Advanced Search Options
Search Logic
The normal behavior of the search is to look for ALL of the words you enter. It assumes "AND" between each search term, so for example:
welfare medicaid
would result in pages that contain both the term "welfare" and the term "medicaid"
Narrowing Your Results
Entering a minus "-" symbol in front of a search term, means that the results should exclude references to that item. For example:
welfare -medicaid
would result in pages that have the term "welfare" but not the term "medicaid".
Entering a plus "+" symbol in front of a search term, means that the results must include references to that item. For example:
welfare +medicaid
would result in pages that have the term "welfare" and also contain the term "medicaid".
Finding Word Variations
You can set Word Variations to one of three options : exact, plural & possessives, or any. For example, for the word "president":
- exact will find only "president"
- plural & possessives will find "president", "presidents", and "president's"
- any will find all of the above plus variations such as "presidential", "presidency", "preside", "presides", etc.
Proximity
By default, search will find pages where your terms appear anywhere on the entire HTML document. You may get better results if you narrow the proximity by:
- line: all search terms must occur on the same line
- sentence: all search terms must occur within the same sentence
- paragraph: all search terms must occur within the same paragraph
- page: all search terms must occur within the same HTML document (this is the default)
Sort by Date
Checking this box will sort the search results by date. The date refers to the date on which the page was indexed by the search engine.
Search these results
On results pages you can check a box to "Search these answers," which allows you to further refine your results by entering additional search terms.
