Search Help

If you are having difficulties, try the following suggestions to solve the problem.

Spelling

Check the spelling of every word in your search request or if available, select one of the suggestions from the spelling checker.

Number of words

Since a document is returned only if it contains all of the words in your search request, reduce the number of words in your search request.

Boolean operators

AND operator

Conjunction operator. Note that AND is the default operator and is equivalent to a space character in the standard search screen.

OR operator

Specify synonyms by separating them with OR. For example, (mobile OR cell) phone, will match documents containing either mobile or cell and the word phone.

NOT operator

You can eliminate documents that contain a particular word by prefixing this word with NOT. You can also use the minus sign instead of NOT.

OPT operator

If you are not certain that a word will be in the document that you are looking for, prefix that word with OPT. This will favor documents that contain the word, but will not eliminate documents that do not. You can also use a question mark instead of OPT.

Grouping

You can group your expressions by using parentheses. For example, (star wars) OR (han solo) will return documents which contain the words star and wars or documents which contain the words han and solo.

Linguistics operators

Sequencing

Use double quotes to force a match on the exact word sequence, as in "mad cow disease" which will only match documents containing the three words mad, cow, and disease in this order.

Exact match

Use the plus + operator to force an exact match for the following word (does not apply to accents) and prevent any match with the word root (for example, +product will search for product and not products). Phrase recognition is automatic, so the search engine may incorrectly recognize a phrase such as "Paris Texas", whereas you were only looking for the two words separately: Paris and Texas. If this happens, simply change the word order of your search request, or prefix one of the words with the plus operator.

Advanced operators

title:

You can restrict your search to the document's title. For example, title:text returns documents which contain the word text in their title.

Truncation

You can search for truncated words. For example, comput* will return every documents containing a word that begins with comput. In the same way, *cognition will return every documents containing a word that ends with cognition.

Regular expressions

You can use advanced regular expressions into your queries. They must be separated from the rest of your query with two /'s. For example, if you want to find documents that contain the word spaghetti and you don't remember the spelling of this word, you can try the query /spagh?et+i/.