eLibrary Searching Tips

At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your query to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started with basic query language and acquaint you with the full power of the search engine.

• By default, phrases will be searched for as though they were linked with AND.  If you do not get the results you want, try linking your search terms with the word OR.  
  
  

• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want to search for the terms literally. For instance, if you type the following query:
  
  "Federal Energy Regulatory Commission"
  
  The search engine will literally look for the complete phrase Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

• By default, a word search will do a search on the word as typed and variations of the word such as bank, banking, and banker. To search solely for the term bank, place the word in double quotations, "bank."
   

• Use of the operator AND will return results containing all of the search words specified.
  
  Example: cats AND dogs
   

• Refine your queries with the NOT keyword to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of surfing but not surfing the Net, write the following query:

  surfing AND NOT "the Net"
   

• Add the OR keyword to select documents that include at least one of the search terms specified, for example:

  Abbott OR Costello

  This query finds all pages that mention Abbott or Costello or both.

• To find words in close proximity, use one of the following operators:

  Near/N

  Selects documents that contain two or more words within N number of words of each other.  N is optional.
  
  Example: gathering<near/3>offshore will locate the words gathering and offshore within three words of each other.
   

  Paragraph

  Selects documents that include all of the search elements you specify within a paragraph.
  
  Example: "interstate commerce"<paragraph>"natural gas"
   

  Sentence

  Selects documents that include all of the specified words within a single sentence.
  
  Example: "interstate commerce"<sentence>"natural gas"
   

• SOUNDEX
  
  Expands the search to include the specified word and one or more words that sound like, or whose letter pattern is similar to, the word.
  
  example: <SOUNDEX>sale
  
  Returns documents that include words such as "sell", "seal", "shell", and "scale." Try also the operator TYPO which expands the search to include the specified word plus words that are similar, e.g., <TYPO>mouse will return documents including "house," "louse," and "moose."
  
  
• CASE
  
  Performs a case sensitive search. The search engine attempts to match the exact use of upper and lower case letters provided in the query expression when a mixed case query is used. 
  
  Example: <CASE> NeXt
  Returns only the precise string "NeXt" and not "next" or "Next".
  
  
  
• MANY
  
  Considers the density of search words when calculating relevance-ranked scores. This operator will rank shorter documents with multiple occurrences of the search terms higher than larger documents with the same number of occurrences. Because the relative density of the occurrences is greater in the shorter document, the document is considered to be more relevant to the query.
  
  
  
• ORDER
  
  Specifies the order in which search elements must occur in the document.
  
  Example: <ORDER><PARAGRAPH>(cat,chases,dog) is more likely to return documents that refer to cats chasing dogs, than dogs chasing cats.
  
  
  
• Ranking
  
  Assigns a relative importance, or weight, to search terms from 1 to 100 where 1 represents the lowest importance and 100 represents the highest importance rating.
  
  Example: [50]good,[80]excellent
  
  Ranks documents containing the word excellent higher than those documents containing the word good.