Search tips
Search tips can help you narrow your results.

Simple search
To do simple keyword search, you can enter one or more query terms (keywords).
The search engine returns documents that contain all of those keywords or variations of the keywords.

For example, if you enter king, the search engine returns all documents that contain the word king or kings. If you enter the query king lear, the search engine returns documents that contain the terms king and lear.
To see more precise results, use more specific keywords.
For example, use French roast coffee rather than coffee.
Or use Kauai hiking tours rather than Hawaiian vacations.

If a simple keyword search returns too many documents that are not what you are looking for, you can use operators to refine your search.

Excluding terms
Use the minus sign (-) to exclude terms.
For example, if you want to find documents with the term lear and you do not want to see documents with edward, enter the query lear -edward.
The minus sign (-) also applies to a term and its variants.
For example, the query -edward will exclude documents that contain the word edward's

Phrase search
If you want to ensure that terms appear exactly in the sequence in which you typed them, you can use double quotation marks.
For example, if you want to see documents with the term king lear exactly as the query and you do not want matches on related phrases such as kingly lear or king and queen lear, enter king lear. Note that the search is still case-insensitive, but term variants are not considered matches.

Wildcard character
The wildcard character (*) helps you find documents when you do not know the full spelling, or if you want to find variations of the term.
For example, the query czech* returns documents with the terms czech, czechoslovakia, czechoslovakian, czech republic, and other possible results.
You can also use the wildcard character in a phrase search.
For example, the query John * Kennedy returns documents with the terms John Fitzgerald Kennedy and John F Kennedy, but not John Kennedy.
Or the query Mi*l Gorbachev will return Mikhail Gorbachev.
Adding a wildcard character to the beginning of a query (for example, *zech) might cause the search engine to take longer to return results.