Need help searching?

Try using the following Boolean Search Terms or quotation marks to improve your search results.

AND

OR

NEAR

For example the search: Town AND taylor AND wells

Will return documents containing all three words. In this case, I was searching for articles on the sale of water wells on Taylor Road .

The search: “Taylor Road”

Will return documents containing the words Taylor and Road in that exact sequence.

Below is more in depth information.

Rules for Formulating Queries

When a search is executed, it returns a list of Web pages that

contain the word or phrase that a user entered, regardless of

where it appears in text.

Follow these rules when formulating queries

Multiple words are treated as individual search terms. So, the

term calendar server returns pages that have both words.

To find pages that have calendar and server in that exact order,

use quotes. “calendar server” returns pages that include both

terms in that exact order with no intervening words.

• Queries are case-insensitive. You can type a query in upper or

lower case.

• Punctuation marks, such as period (.) and comma (,), are

ignored by a search.

• To use special characters, such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a

query, enclose the query in quotation marks (“).

• To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks,

surround the entire phrase with quotation marks and double

the quotation marks around the word to be surrounded with

quotes. For example, “World-Wide Web or ““Web””” searches

for World-Wide Web or “Web”.

• Use Boolean operators (AND, OR) and the proximity operator

(NEAR) to specify additional search criteria. See Also:

• Use the wildcard character (*) to find words with a given prefix.

For example, the query esc* finds Web pages with “ESC,”

“escape,” and so on.

• To nest expressions within a query, add parentheses.

Expressions within parentheses are evaluated before the rest

of the query.

• Use double quotes (“) to ignore a Boolean or NEAR operator

keyword. For example, “Abbott and Costello” finds pages with

the entire phrase, not pages that match the Boolean

expression. In addition to being an operator, the word “and” is a

noise word in English.

• The NEAR operator is like the AND operator because it finds

pages that include both search words. However, the rank assigned by NEAR depends on the proximity of the search words. A page with the searched-for

words closer together has a higher rank than a page where

they are farther apart. If the search words are more than 50

words apart, the page is assigned a rank of zero.

NOTE The NEAR operator can be applied only to words or phrases.

• The AND operator has a higher precedence than OR. For

example, the first three queries are equal, but the fourth is not:

- a AND b OR c

- c OR a AND b

- c OR (a AND b)

- (c OR a) AND b