Following is a list of the search operators and brief descriptions of how they will help you build a search.
Please note that common words such as of, the, at, whenever or somebody are not indexed and therefore are ignored by the search engine, both for matching and for proximity checking
| Boolean operators | ||||
| AND | Searches for documents containing both of the words it separates. | drugs AND crime locates documents containing both words. | ||
| OR | Searches for documents containing either of the words it separates. | drugs OR crime locates documents containing at least one of the words. | ||
| NOT | Searches for documents containing the query word preceding it without containing the word following it. | drugs NOT crime locates documents containing drugs but not containing crime. | ||
| Proximity Operators | ||||
| NEAR/x | Functions as bi-directional proximity operator if word range is specified. If no word range is specified, functions as bi-directional adjacency operator. | drugs NEAR/3 crime locates documents with drugs within 3 indexed words of crime
drugs NEAR crime locates documents with phrases like "drug crime", "crime and drugs", etc. |
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| ADJ | Searches for documents in which the query word that follows it appears immediately after the word preceding it. | drug ADJ crime would match "drug crime" or "drugs and crime", but not "crime and drugs". | ||
| W/x | Searches for word pairs in which the pair's second term occurs within a specified number of words after the first. | estimates W/5 environment locates documents in which environment occurs within five indexed words after estimates. | ||
| Wildcard Operators | ||||
| ? | Matches any one character. | wom?n locates woman or women. | ||
| * | Matches any number of characters. | inval* matches invaluable, invalidated. *late matches stipulate, relate. |
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| # | Forces an exact word match. | fish# will locate documents containing fish, but not documents containing fishing or fishery. | ||