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Search Tips/Help

At its simplest, a search can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your search to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started and acquaint you with how to use the search function of our website.

  • Look for words with the same prefix. For example, when searching type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.
     
  • Search for all forms of a word. For example, when searching type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.
     
  • Search with the keyword near, rather than and, for words close to each other. For example, both of these searches, system and manager and system near manager, look for the words system and manager 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 searches with the and not keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of surfing but not the net, do the following search: surfing and not the net.
     
  • Add the or keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example: Abbott or Costello. This query finds all pages that mention Abbott or Costello or both.
     
  • Put quotation marks around keywords if you want the search to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following query: "system near manager" the search will literally look for the complete phrase system near manager. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks: system near manager, it searches all documents for the words system and manager.

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