Search Rules

This search engine helps you find documents on this website. 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.

How To Use:

1. Type your keywords in the search box.
2. Press the Search button to start your search.

Here's an example:

1. Type literature France in the search box.
2. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
3. The Results page will show you numerous pages on this site about France and  literature

Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.

Modification in this example:    

   1.   Change the Match from "Any" to "All"
   2.   Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
   3.   This will produce only those pages with both the keywords.

Identifiers:

    1.   Where practical we have tried to include subject, place, and time identifiers as
         keywords.
   2.   This means that in the example above, you can type literature France 20th
          century  and the search results would return only those pages dealing with
         French literature of the 20th century

More Basics - An Overview

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.

Example #1: To find a particular book title, type "brass butterfly" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Example #2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999 9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR".

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

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 books by Dickens, but not Charles Dickens, type +dickens -charles.

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.

Example: Try wish* to find wish, wishes, or wishful.