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Advanced Search Instructions
You can include various "special words" (operators) in the "Search for" box to help refine your search.
This is one case where a few examples are better than a lengthy discussion. (In these examples, [square brackets]
are used to demark the content in the search box. The square brackets themselves should be omitted.)
- [Bob, Joe, Jane] searches for any documents containing any one (or more) of "Bob", "Joe", or "Jane".
- [Bob OR Joe OR Jane] is identical to the example above. "Or" and comma have the same meaning.
- [Bob AND Joe] searches for any documents containing BOTH "Bob" AND "Joe".
- [Bob AND (Joe OR Jane)] searches for any documents that contain Bob AND either Joe OR Jane.
- [(Bob AND Bill) OR (Joe AND Jane)] searches for any documents that contain both Bob AND Bill or both
Joe AND Jane.
- "Bob And Jane" searches for an exact match of the contents inside the double quotes.
Other general rules regarding searches are as follows.
- * is a wildcard for any number of characters.
- ? is a wildcard for any single character.
- The search looks for whole words and stems related to whole words. It doesn't look for
word fragments. For example a search on "leph" will NOT find "elephant". Meanwhile, a search on
"elephant" will find "elephants", the latter being a plural stem from the root word.
- Words with a "stem" that matches a search word's stem will be found.
For example, "tax" will return "tax, taxing, and taxation."
"taxation" will find "tax, taxing, and taxation."
"planets" will find "planet, planets, planetology".
"run" will find "run and running".
- ALL mixed-case searches are assumed to be case-sensitive. Single-case searches are NOT
case sensitive. For example, "employee" and "EMPLOYEE" will return exactly the same results.
Meanwhile, "Employee" will find "Employee" but not "EMPLOYEE".
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