Search Rules

This search engine helps you find documents on this website and on related sites. It works quite simply: you tell the search service what you are looking for by typing keywords, phrases, or questions into the search box, and the service returns a list of all the web pages in our index that relate to those topics. The most relevant content is always shown at the top of your results.

How To Use

1. Type your keywords into the search box.
2. Click the Search button to begin your search.

Here is an example

1. Type oatmeal cookies into the search box.
2. Click the Search button, or simply press the Enter key.

Tip: Do not be concerned if your search returns a large number of results. In fact, we would encourage you to use more than just one or two words when searching. Even when the number of results is large, the most relevant pages will always appear first.

More Basics — An Overview

What is an Index?

As per Webster's dictionary, an "index" is a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large and continuously growing, well-organised collection of web pages and discussion group pages gathered from all over the world. It grows larger every single day, both because people submit new web page addresses to us, and because our own crawling technology actively searches the web for links to new pages. When you use our search service, you are searching this entire collection using your chosen keywords or phrases.

What is a Word?

For the purpose of searching, a word may be understood as any combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know exactly where one word ends and the next begins in order to find precisely what you are looking for. Words may be separated using white space or tabs.

What is a Phrase?

Words and numbers may be linked together into phrases whenever you would like them to appear together, in that exact order, within your results. To search for an exact phrase, simply place "double quotation marks" around it when typing into the search box.

Example 1: To find lyrics by the King, you might type "you ain't nothing but a hound dog" into the search box. Phrases may also be formed using punctuation or special characters, such as dashes, underscores, commas, slashes, or dots.

Example 2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 rather than 1 800 999 9999. The dashes here link the numbers together as a single phrase.

Simple Tips for More Precise Searches

Searches are not case-sensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match both the lower-case "fur" and the upper-case "FUR" equally well.

By default, searches are also accent-insensitive, although site administrators may change this setting if required. Accent sensitivity concerns Latin characters such as õ.

Including or Excluding Words

To ensure that a particular word is always included in your search, place a plus (+) sign directly before that keyword in the search box. Likewise, to ensure that a particular word is always excluded, place a minus (-) sign directly before it.

Example: To find recipes for cookies that include oatmeal but do not include raisins, you could try recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin.

Expanding Your Search With Wildcards (*)

Typing an asterisk (*) within a keyword allows the search to match up to four additional letters after it.

Example: Try wish* to find matches such as wish, wishes, or wishful.

Searching for Web Addresses

If your search term happens to be a URL, such as "http://www.yahoo.com/", certain search engines may redirect you directly to that URL rather than showing you search results. To avoid this and carry out an actual search using the URL as your search term, please enclose the URL within double quotation marks.

Advanced Search Options

You are not limited to searching plain text alone. Kindly find below the additional ways in which you may refine your search:

link:address
Finds pages that link to the specified address, or to any substring of it. For instance, use link:microsoft.com to find all pages that link to Microsoft's sites. Please note that this feature may not be available on all search engines.

text:text
Finds pages that contain the specified text within the body of the document. By comparison, a search without the "text:" attribute will also scan the URL, title, links, and META tags, in addition to the document body.

title:text
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (the text that appears in the title bar of most browsers). For example, the search title:Elvis would find pages with "Elvis" appearing in the title.

url:text
Finds pages that contain a specific word or phrase within the URL itself. For example, use url:altavista to find all pages, on any server, that have the word "altavista" anywhere in the host name, path, or filename — that is, anywhere in the complete URL.