Searching for a Single Term

Searching for a single term is the simplest type of search query you can perform. Any occurence of the term you specify will be found. For instance, to search for all occurences of the word "wisdom" you would use the following search query:

wisdom

Searching for Two or More Terms

If you want to find documents which have occurences of two or more terms, you simply specify all the terms separate by spaces. For instance, if you want to find all documents which contain the terms "wisdom", "knowledge" and "source" then you would use the following search query:

wisdom knowledge source

An alternative form of the same query uses the "and" keyword to connect the terms:

wisdom and knowledge and source

Searching for Multiple Terms

Another type of search query with multiple terms is when you want to find occurences of any term in a set of terms rather than every term in a set of terms as in the previous example. In these cases, you need to use the special "or" keyword to join together your terms. For instance, if you want to find any occurence of any of the three terms "wisdom", "knowledge" and "source" then you would use the following search query:

wisdom or knowledge or source

Excluding Terms from a Search

If you want to explicitly exclude terms from a search then you qualify the term with the "not" keyword. For instance, if you want to find all documents with an occurence of the term "wisdom" which do not contain the term "knowledge" then you would use the following search query:

wisdom not knowledge

Building Complex Queries

Using the "and", "or" and "not" keywords you can build fairly complex queries. For instance, consider the following query:

wisdom and knowledge not source

This query would find all documents which contains the terms "wisdom" and "knowledge" but do not contain the term "source". You can use parentheses in these complex queries to indicate the order in which the joining of terms should occur as in the following example:0

(wisdom and knowledge) or (wisdom not source)

This query would find all documents which meet either of the following conditions: documents which contain both "wisdom" and "knowledge" or documents which contains "wisdom" but do not contain "source".

Searching for Complete Phrases

If you want to search for a specific phrase, then simply entering the phrases as follows is insufficient:

source of wisdom

While this query will find the phrase "source of wisdom" as well as pages which contain the three terms "source", "of" and "wisdom" in any order or combination and separated by any number of other words. If you really want to find just the exact phrase "source of wisdom" then you need to surround the phrase with double quotes:

"source of wisdom"

An alternate way to indicate you are searching for an exact phrase is to surround the phrase with curly brackets:

{source of wisdom}

Searching for Partial Terms

In normal circumstances searching for a term only matches exact, complete occurences of the term. Therefore, if you search for the term "know" then "knowledge" would be a match for this search. If, however, you want to search for partial terms, you can use the special wildcard character, *, to indicate this.

If you want to find words, for instance, which start with the term "know" then you would use the query:

know*

Similarly, if you want to find all words which end in "ing" then you would use:

*ing

You can even find matches for a query term anywhere in a word with two wildcards. For instance, if you want to find all matches for "my" anywhere in any word then you would use:

*my*

Important Points

There are some points that are worth noting when creating your search queries:

• Searching is case insenstitive. That means a search for "wisdom", "WISDOM", "Wisdom" and "WiSdOM" are all the same.
• You can search for terms which contain punctuation such as slashes and dashes but the matching is not always perfect.