Search Tips

At its simplest, a keyword search can be just a word or phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can tune your search to give you better results. These tips will get you started with basic query language and acquaint you with the full capabilities of this search engine.

• Look for words with the same prefix. For example, type democrat* to find democrat, democrats, democratic, democratize, and so on.

• Search for all forms of a word. For example, type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.

• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, democrat and republican and democrat near republican, look for the words democrat and republican on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.

• Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of democrat but not republican, trype:
  democrat and not republican

• Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:
  democrat or republican

  This query finds all pages that mention democrat or republican or both.

• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want the search engine to take them literally. For instance, if you type:
  "democrat near republican"

  The search engine will literally look for the complete phrase democrat near republican. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks:

  democrat near republican

  The search engine searches all documents for the words democrat and republican.