Search Hints and Tips

Boolean Expressions

Use commas in your search query to represent boolean OR. Do not include a space after each comma. To find all documents that contain at least one occurrence of "sports", or "athletics", or "fitness":

: sports,athletics,fitness

Use semicolons to represent boolean AND:

: women;journalism

Use curly brackets to combine boolean expressions, for example:

: {vegan,vegetarian};{food,cooking}

Queries consisting of two or more words without intervening punctuation may be used for phrase searching:

: inaugural address
: united nations
: blue suede shoes

Word phrases can also be combined using curly brackets, for example:

: {united nations},{global politics}

Important note: phrase searching will not find a phrase that is broken onto two lines in the source document. If your phrase search doesn't find the desired document, try using boolean expressions instead. But this could also give you unrelated documents that contain the target words in another context:

: inaugural;address
: united;nations
: blue;suede;shoes

Faster Searches

A search for common words takes longer than a search for uncommon words.

You can speed up your search, and reduce the number of unrelated documents returned, by combining your terms using the boolean AND. A search for

: spanish;conversation

is faster and more precise than a search for

: spanish

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