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Advanced Searching Techniques	July 29, 2010

Not satisfied with the results of your search? Learn to use these simple search operators and you can enhance the results returned by your search. Here are some of the things you should know about this search engine:

Case Matters: This search engine distinguishes between upper and lower case in your search. If you use ALL upper case or ALL lower case letters in your search, the engine will ignore instances of case and return all matches. If you use a combination of both, your results will match ONLY those instances that exactly match your search criteria. So, searching for sea will find SEA and sea and Sea and sEA (if you find anything like that last one let us know right away!), while searching for Sea will only find Sea.

Boolean Operators: Your query syntax can include AND, OR or NOT. Commas are treated like OR.

Wildcards: In addition, you may use any of the following wildcard operators in your search...

?	matches any single alphanumeric character.
*	matches zero or more alphanumeric characters.
[]	matches one of the characters contained between the brackets.
{}	matches all the patterns, separated by commas, contained in the curly brackets.
^	when used inside square brackets, indicates that a match should be made for any character not contained in the brackets.
-	when used inside square brackets, indicates a range of characters.

Pattern Matching:

sea?	matches seas and seat but not sea.
sea*	matches seas and seat but also sea, search, seam, and any other combination starting with sea.
sea[st]	matches seas and seat but not seam, sea, or search.
sea{m,rch}	matches seam and search but not seat, seas or sea.
sea[^st]	matches seam and seal but not seas or seat.
sea[a-z]	matches every possible combination of sea followed by a single letter including seas, seat, seam and seal.