Search is not case-sensitive.

You may search for any word except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words). Words in the exception list are ignored during a search. In Exact Phrase searches, words in the exception list are treated as placeholders.

Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search, except as separators during Keyword Searches.

To use specially-treated characters ( (&), (|), (^), (#), (@), ($), ((), ()) ) in a query, enclose your query in quotes ("). For example, "this&that".

To search for dates you need to put the full year first then the two-digit month and two-digit day. For example, 2002/07/25.

Exact Phrase Searches

When using the Exact Phrase search criteria, you need to add quotation marks. Search will return results that contain at least one occurrence of the exact string of words you entered in the exact order you entered them, except for common words. Punctuation doesn't affect Exact Phrase searches. For example, "investment analysis"

An Any Words query will return results containing at least one occurrence of at least one of the keywords you enter. This is the least specific type of search, and usually returns a large result set. If you are having trouble getting results for your query, use an Any Words query.

An All Words query is more specific and requires that results contain at least one occurrence of every keyword you enter.

For keyword searches, Search will treat anything separated by spaces as distinct (separate) words. If you want to ensure that certain names or phrases are treated as single units – e.g., Internet Explorer, Windows 2000, total cost of ownership -- you can use commas as separators. Other than this special use of commas, Search ignores punctuation.

Boolean searching is used mostly by advanced searchers with specific information needs. The search engine used supports the standard Boolean operators and syntax: And (and, &); Or (or, |); Not (and not, &!); and related precedence operators such as (), "", etc. Note the order of precedence is (1) NOT (!), (2) AND (&), then (3) OR (|).

You can use the asterisk (*) and question mark (?) as wildcard characters in searches. The asterisk wildcard matches any sequence of characters, and the question mark wildcard matches any single character. For example, *tment (for investment, or any other word ending in "tment"), or wo?d (for word, or any other four letter word starting with "wo" and ending with "d".)

Once you have completed your search of any one or more of the libraries, you will receive search results. These results will be formatted in the following manner:

 In the left column you will find:

The most number of red circles in the left column indicates the search engine found the most occurrences of your phrase or word.

Summary – The search engine displays your phrase or word in the context of the preceding sentence and the sentence it was found in.

Full unformatted – The search engines displays unformatted version of the document that it found your phrase or word and highlights every occurrence. It also provides links to the next occurrence for every occurrence found.

In the right column you will find:

The title of the page the search located your query.

An abstract of the first new lines of the page your query was on.