Search Tips

Words separated by spaces or ordinary punctuation (except for those special characters listed in the table below) are treated as a phrase. The search will only return documents that contain this phrase. However, words within the phrase which are common words (such as a, as, and, but, for, the, etc.) are completely ignored. Matching is also case-insensitive. So searching for the hand; and the creator will also match the Hand of the Creator.

To search for a phrase that contains quotation marks, or one of the special characters such as an exclamation mark, we have to enclose the whole phrase in quotation marks, and then place double quotation marks where you want a quotation mark to appear. For example, "Jesus said, ""I tell you the truth!"" ".

To search for several individual words in a document, we separate the words with a comma. The result will be documents that contain all, or only some, of the words listed. The more that match, however, the better the ranking of the result.

Other than that, the normal wildcard and Boolean operators can also be used. An asterisk(*) matches any number of characters, and a question mark(?) matches any single character. There's also the option of a fuzzy search. Adding two asterisks to the end of a word will match 'stem words' with the same meaning. A search for catch**, for instance, will include catching and caught.

To combine words in the search string, use Boolean operators like this:

Adapted from "The Index Server Query Language." Professional Active Server Pages 2.0. Wrox Press, LTD. 1998.  p677-689.