Tips To Improve Your Searches
A search (query) can be as simple as a word or a phrase. But you can refine your search with these tips to improve the focus of your search.
Word Prefixes and Forms
Add * to a search word to find documents containing words with the same prefix. For example, use profess* to find documents containing professor, profession, professional.
Add ** to a search word to find forms of the word. For example, use teach** to find documents containing teach, teaching, teacher, taught, etc.
Keywords: "and", "and not", "or", "near"
Use and and or to narrow or broaden your document search.
The query this or that finds documents containing either word or both words.
On the other hand, this and that only finds documents containing both words.
The keyword near between two search words is like and,
but causes the searcher to rank documents where the two words are in close proximity more
highly. For example, the queries public and history and public near
history look for the words public and history in the same document.
But with near, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: the
closer together the words are in a document, the higher ranked the document.
Refine your queries with the and not keywords to exclude documents with
certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find documents containing
history but not public history, use the query history and not
public history.
Quotations and Phrases
Put quotation marks around keywords if you want the search engine to take them
literally. For instance, the query "budget near completion"
asks the searcher to look for the complete phrase budget near completion.
The same query without the quotation marks (budget near completion)
asks the searcher for all documents containing the words budget and
completion.