How to Search

Sometimes a simple search is not descriptive enough to produce the desired results. In some cases, the query may not locate any matching documents. In others the results list may be too large or too short, or the documents in the results list may not contain relevant information.
In these instances, you may need to modify your search in order to get a better results list. Using the following guide, you can better define your terms and communicate a more precise request to the search engine.

Refining Searches

- You can use AND between the terms you specify to force the engine to locate only the documents that contain ALL of your terms, thereby eliminating irrelevant documents.
- A search for Author AND Topic AND Country locates pages that contain All three keywords.
- Broadening Searches Use OR between several terms to have the search engine look for the occurrence of either term.
- A search for Family OR Relatives OR Parents will locate at least one of the three terms specified.
- Excluding Terms From Searches Use NOT to refine a term when a word has more than one meaning.
- A search for Bank NOT River will likely eliminate pages that don't relate to Bank as the place where you deposit your money.
- Proximity Searching Use <NEAR> to locate terms appearing close to each other within a given document, for example, within a sentence or a paragraph.
- A search for Publishing <NEAR> Images will look for these terms in close proximity to one another.