Search Help

To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more detailed your query, the more relevant your results.

Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

Translated: require WILCOX, require john

Finds "wilcox john", "WILCOX John", and "WILCOX, Mrs. John ".
Does not find the lowercase "wilcox john", nor the abbreviated "WILCOX j.".

Translated: require wilcox, forbid john

Finds "WILCOX Rhoda Jane", "Ulster Wilcox", and mixed case "Conrad Wilcox".
Does not find "WILCOX John" nor "Wilcox John".

Translated: prefer john, require wilcox

Finds "WILCOX John", "WILCOX Mrs. John", and "Conrad Wilcox".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.

Translated: require the phrase "WILCOX John"

Finds "WILCOX John".
Does not find "Wilcox John" nor "John WILCOX".

Translated: require john (case insensitive), require words starting with "wil"

Finds "John Wilcox", "John Wilcocks", "John Wilcots".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.

Translated: require Venus (case sensitive), require pictures, forbid planet, prefer images

First lists "pictures and images of Venus", then "Venus pictures".
Does not list lowercase "venus picture", nor forbidden "picture of planet Venus".

Translated: ignores common words like where, is, and the - requires words containing "frog"

Finds "frog", "frogleg", and "bullfrog".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *frog*?".

Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "usa" will match "Usa", "USA", and "usA", while the term "USA" matches only its uppercase version.

The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.