Refining your search

Often, just typing a few keywords isn't enough to find the documents you want. This search engine provides a wealth of search operators to help you get the job done. By including special words such as AND, OR, and NOT in your search criteria, or by using various wildcards, you can tweak your seaches so you find exactly what you are looking for.

Using AND, OR, and NOT If you want to refine your search a little, you can use special search operators in your search criteria to get more specific.

Basic Search Operators
Operator	Effect	Example
AND	Searches for documents that have both words in it.	Video AND Audio
OR	Searches for documents that have either word in it.	Video OR Audio
NOT	Eliminates documents where the word is found.	Video NOT Audio

TIP: A comma can be used instead of OR in search criteria. So a search for Video, Audio is the same as a search for Audio OR Video

Using Parentheses and Quote Marks Search criteria can start to look pretty ambiguous once there are more than two search words present. For instance if you typed in Audio AND Video OR Conferencing, what would that mean exactly? Documents that definitely contained "Audio" but that only needed to contain "Video" or "Conferencing"? Or documents that contained "Audio" in addition to documents that contained both "Video" and "Conferencing"?

Use parentheses and quotation marks to indicate this type of criteria, where the "order of evaluation" needs to be specified.

Examples: Quotation Marks and Parentheses
Character	Purpose	Examples
(Parentheses)	Determines how ANDs and ORs are treated. Words within parentheses are considered as a unit, and are considered first.	Conferencing OR (Video AND Audio)
"Quotation Marks"	Quoted words or phrases are searched for literally. Useful when you want to search for the actual words, "and" or "or".	"Video and Audio" Video AND "Audio not implemented"

Using Wildcards This search engine provides a few wildcards that you can use use in your searches, so that you can find documents based on incomplete search words or phrases.

Two Wildcards
Wildcard	Purpose
*	* stands in for any number of characters (including zero). So a search for Vid* would find Video, Videography, Videographic.
?	? stands in for any single charater. More precisely--and thus generally less helpful--than the * wildcard. A search for ?ar?et would find both carpet and target, but not Learjet.