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Search Tips
At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this
page, you can change the focus of your query to give you more precise results. These tips
will get you started with basic query language and acquaint you with the power of the
search engine.
| Word Searching |
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Type one or more key words separated by the operator AND (see below for more
information on the use of Boolean operators).
Sample search: water AND wastewater will give a list of documents
containing both water and wastewater. The documents containing the most instances of the
key words will appear at the top of the search results list.
| Phrase searching |
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Type key words together to ensure that the search results contain only perfect matches
(the same words in the same order).
Sample search: affordable housing will give results containing the phrase affordable housing.
Put quotation marks around keywords if your query contains one of the Boolean operators
and you want Index Server to take them literally.
Sample search: wastewater and sewage treatment will give results
containing the phrase wastewater and sewage treatment
| Truncation |
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Replace the ending of a key word with an asterisk (*) as a wild card character to
retrieve documents containing variant root word endings.
Example: financ* will retrieve documents containing the variations finance,
finances, financial, finance's, etc.
| "Fuzzy" searching |
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Add two asterisks (**) as wild card characters to the end of a key word to search for
all forms of that word.
Example: sink** will retrieve documents containing sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.
| Boolean operators |
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Are used to combine key words into one search.
- & (and) : used to include two or more concepts in a search. (i.e. &
narrows a search.)
Example: roads & highways will retrieve documents containing both
concepts.
- |(or) : used to search for synonyms, related words or different forms of a word. (i.e. |
expands a search.)
Example: city | municipality will retrieve documents
containing either or both of the concepts.
- &! (and not): used to exclude documents containing certain key
words. (i.e. &! narrows a search.)
Example: road &! highway will retrieve only documents about road projects.
- ~ (near): used rather than & to search for words close to each
other (proximity searching).
Example: both of these queries, water & treatment and water
~ treatment, look for the words water and treatment on the same page.
But with ~, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity. The closer together
the words are in the document, the higher the document will be ranked and the closer the
document will be to the top of the search results list .
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