At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with
the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your query to
give you more complete results. These tips will get you started
with basic query language.
• Look for words with
the same prefix. For example, in your query
form type key* to
find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.
• Search for all forms
of a word. For example, in the form 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, look for the words system and manager
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 surfing but not the Net, write the following
query: surfing AND NOT the Net
• Add
the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another,
for example: Abbott OR Costello. This query finds all pages that
mention Abbott or Costello or both.
• Put quotation marks
around keywords if you want the search to take them literally.
For instance, if you type the following query: "system
near manager" the search will literally look
for the complete phrase, system near manager.
But if you type the same query without the quotation marks: system
near manager.
The search engine searches all documents for the
words system and manager.
• Use
Free Text Queries if you want to
enter queries using natural language. The search
engine will examine your query, extract nouns and noun phrases
and construct a query for you. With free text queries you can
enter any text you want, from a proper question, to a string of
words and phrases, without worrying about the query language.
Search for documents in this web containing specific words or
combinations of words. The text search engine will display a weighted
list of matching documents, with better matches shown first. Each
list item is a link to a matching document; if the document has
a title it will be shown, otherwise only the document's file name
is displayed.
