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Quickie info:

Use "and," "or" and "not" to join search terms.
Group with parentheses."*" is the wildcard character.
Use quotation marks to enclose an exact phrase.

[Query Basics - Regular Expressions - Escaping Characters]

Query Basics (top)
  • To find documents that contain every word simply list those words. For example, to find all documents that contain both the words "search" and "tips" enter:

      search tips

    A space between search terms is implicitly "and".

  • To find documents that contain any listed word string the words together using the word "or". For example, to find all documents that contain either the word "search" or "tips" enter:

      search OR tips

  • You can use the word "not" to exclude pages. For example, the query

      search not tips

    would find pages which contain the word "search" and no pages that contain the word "tips". Note that this is the same as the query

      search and not tips

    On the other hand, the query

      search or not tips

    would return pages that contained pages with both the words "search" and "tips" but never any pages that contained the word "tips" and no occurrences of the word "search".

  • You can use parentheses to group search terms. For example, the query

      not (search tips)

    would find all documents that did not contain the words "search" or the word "tips".

    You can nest parentheses to any level as in:

      not (search (tips or help))

  • The character '*' is called the "wildcard" and represents "anything". The query

      pre*

    would find documents with indexed words that begin with "pre". The query

      *ing

    would find documents with indexed words that end with "ing". And the query

      pre*ing

    would find documents with indexed words that begin with "pre" and end with "ing".
Regular Expressions (top)
If you are familiar with the definition of a regular expression then you may use such expressions as search terms provided you enclose them in the angular brackets: < >

For example, to search for documents which contain sequences of numbers of length at most 20 you would enter

    <[:digit:]{1,20}>

Escaping Characters (top)
Some characters in a query which is a Boolean expression or regular expression have special meaning. To "turn off" this meaning of the character simply escape it using the backslash '\'. For example, to search for the previous sample query in this document you would enter:

    \<\[\:digit\:\]\{1\,20\}\>

i.e. you need to escape the characters: < [ : ] > { , }

Note: A "phrase" search (see below) allows you to do the same search without the need to escape each such special character.

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