Search Help?

This list gives the rules for formulating queries:

• Multiple consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in the same order within a matching document.

• Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.

• You can search for any word except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search.

• Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. For example, if you searched for “Word for Windows”, the results could give you “Word for Windows” and “Word and Windows”, because for is a noise word and appears in the exception list.

• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.

• To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (“).

• To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, “World-Wide Web or ““Web””” searches for World-Wide Web or “Web”.