Search
Searching
Enter a word or a phrase that you are looking for. The implicit logical operator is or. For example, if you enter the words dog cat, the system first looks up all documents which contain both of these words and then all documents which contain each word separately.
When sorting the results, each word has a different weight depending on the place where it is found - it is most significant in the page title, medium significant in the description, and least significant in the address (URL).
The phrase you are looking for may be enclosed in quotes to limit the search to documents where the words adjoin. For example, if you search for "shepherd dog", the system only finds documents with this exact phrase.
Case is not significant - entering Linux and linux gives the same results.
Words may be connected with logical operators AND, OR, NOT and grouped with parentheses (to override operator priority) and quotes (to form phrases). Beware that logical operators must be all uppercase, otherwise the system treats them as words to search for.
Example: (Doberman OR Alsatian) AND whelp finds all records which contain Doberman or Alsatian, but they must also contain whelp.
You may also use advanced search:
+word
which means that a word must be present in the result. Note that the queries Dog AND cat and Dog +cat are not equivalent. "+" indicates that this word must necessarily be present in the result, whereas AND is the logical conjunction. By using "+" you are saying: find all records which may contain Dog and must contain cat. The equivalent to Dog AND cat is thus +Dog +cat.
-word
which means that a word must not be present in the result
characters * and ?
function as wild cards, e.g. progr* finds both program and programme (or even progression), authori?ed finds both authorized and authorised. The asterisk stands for any number of characters. The question mark stands for exactly one character.
modifier ^
allows you to increase the weight of a searched word, e.g. querying for dog Doberman^9 means that you're interested in pages about dogs and you're particularly interested in the word Doberman. The result list will then be sorted differently than that for the query dog Doberman.
Some words are not indexed by the system, because they occur very often in texts and their search has virtually no influence on the results. These words, called stop-words, include especially conjunctions, prepositions and so on (and, on, from…). That's why searching for and gives you no results.
