Search Tips

Search Ideas

This search engine helps you find documents on this website and related sites. Here's how it works: you tell the search service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

Some Tips:

What is an Index?

Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages and discussion group pages from around the world. The 'index' becomes larger every day as people send us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have technology that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When you use our search service, you search the entire collection using keywords or phrases.

What is a Word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

What is a Phrase?

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Books" will match the lowercase "books" and uppercase "BOOKS".

By default, all searches are accent insensitive as well, but administrators can change this setting. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like è.

Including or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find recipes for cookies with oatmeal but without raisins, try "recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin".

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * at the end of a keyword, you can search for the word with multiple endings.

Example: Try wish*, to find wish, wishes, wishful, wishbone, and wishy-washy.

Searching for web addresses:

If your search term is a URL, like "http://www.books.com/", some search engines will redirect you directly to the URL. To avoid this behavior, and do an actual search with the URL as the search term, enclose the URL in double-quotes.

Fancy Features for Typical Searches

You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on the net:

link:address
Finds pages that link to the specified address, or a substring of it. Use link:abc.com to find all pages linking to Abc sites. Note: this feature is not implemented on all search engines.

text:text
Finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link, or URL. The search text:paper bags would find all pages with the term paper bags in them.

title:text
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:Cow boy would find pages with Cow boy in the title.

url:text
Finds pages with a specific word or phrase in the URL. Use url:storefront to find all pages on all servers that have the word Storefront in the host name, path, or filename - the complete URL, in other words.