Search Tips

Table of Contents

• Getting Started with Search
  • Capitalization
  • Common Words
• Expanding Your Search
• Refining Your Search
  • Word Exclusion
  • Phrase Searches

Getting Started with Search

To search for a document, you can type a few descriptive words in the search box, and press the Enter key or click the search button.

The search produces a results page with a list of documents and web pages that are related to your search terms. The most relevant search results will appear at the top of the page. By default, the search engine returns only pages that include all of your search terms.

To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms. You do not need to include "and" between the terms. For example, to search for documents related to internal appointment processes, type internal appointment processes.

Capitalization

Searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are handled as lower case. For example, searches for "Human Resources," "human resources," and "Human resources" return the same results.

Common Words

The search engine ignores common words and characters, such as "where" and "how," as well as certain single digits and letters. (These tend to slow down your search without improving the results.) The search indicates that a common word has been excluded by displaying details on the results page.

If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a plus ("+") sign in front of it. Include a space before the "+" sign, but not after it. For example, to search for documents about Human Resources, type Human +Resources.

Alternatively, you can enclose a series of words with quotation marks and do a phrase search.

Expanding Your Search

You can expand your search by using the word OR. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase OR between terms. For example, to search for an office in either Edmonton or Toronto, type office edmonton OR toronto

Refining Your Search

Refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The search returns results based on the pages that were returned by your original broad search.

If you do not get the results you want, you can try to exclude words, search for exact phrases, or restrict the search to a range of numbers.

Word Exclusion

If your search term has more than one meaning, you can focus your search by adding a minus sign ("-") in front of words related to the meaning you want to avoid. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign. You can include more than one meaning you want to exclude.

For example, to search for the planet Saturn and exclude search results about the car company or Roman god, type Saturn -car -god . The search engine will return pages about Saturn that do not contain the word "car" or "god."

Phrase Searches

Phrase searches are useful when you are searching for famous sayings or specific names. You can search for an exact phrase or name in the following ways:

• By enclosing the phrase in quotation marks. The search engine will return only documents that includes the exact phrase you entered.
• By using phrase connectors—such as hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes—in between every word of your search query.

Phrase connectors and quotation marks join your search words as a single unit. For example, if you type father-in-law, the search engine treats it as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in quotation marks.

(Adapted from Google Mini Search Tips, © 2002-2006 Google)