Search Help

Boolean expressions

Search for Boolean expressions like:

word1 AND word2

This will search for all objects that contain both "word1" and "word2". Valid Boolean operators include AND, OR, and NOT. A synonym for NOT is a leading hyphen:

word1 -word2

which would search for occurences of "word1" but would exclude documents which contain "word2". A sequence of words without operators implies AND. A search for "carpet python snakes" translates to "carpet AND python AND snakes".

Parentheses

Control search order with parenthetical expressions:

(word1 AND word2) OR word3)

This will return objects containing "word1" and "word2" or just objects that contain the term "word3".

Wild cards

Search for wild cards like:

Z*

which returns all words that begin with "Z", or:

Zop?

which returns all words that begin with "Zop" and have one more character - just like in a Un*x shell. Note though that wild cards cannot be at the beginning of a search phrase. "?ope" is an illegal search term and will be ignored.

Phrase search

Double-quoted text implies phrase search, for example:

"carpet python" OR frogs 

will search for all occurences of the phrase "carpet python" or of the word "frogs"

All of these advanced features can be mixed together. For example:

((bob AND uncle) AND NOT Zoo*)

will return all objects that contain the terms "bob" and "uncle" but will not include any objects that contain words that start with "Zoo" like "Zoologist", "Zoology", or "Zoo" itself.

Similarly, a search for:

snakes OR frogs -"carpet python"

will return all objects which contain the word "snakes" or "frogs" but do not contain the phrase "carpet python".