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.
Look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query form type scot* to find scot, scotland, scottish, scotsman, and so on.
Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type sink** to find sink, sinking and sunk.
Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, crime and poverty and crime near poverty, look for the words crime and poverty on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.
Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of crime but not British crime, write the following query: crime AND NOT British crime
Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example: crime OR punishment This query finds all pages that mention crime or punishment or both.
Put quotation marks around keywords if you want the search to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following query: "crime and punishment" search will literally look for the complete phrase crime and punishment. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks : crime and punishment searches all documents for the words crime and punishment.
