Guide to Boolean Searches

Search for Exact Words or Phrases

If you are searching for an exact match, enclose your search in quotes.  If you enclose your search in quotes you will only get results for the exact term or phrases you entered in the exact order you entered them.

Examples of seaching for an exact phrase:

"2007 Annual Meeting"
"Executive Officer"
"Code of Ethics"
"Footnotes"

You can also search for an exact phrase and a keyword as in the following examples:

"annual meeting" childcare
"Frances Fox" Piven
"committee on" sections

Wild Cards

If you are not certain of the spelling of a word or if you would like to conduct a search on just part of a word or phrase, you can use a wild card.  Enter the partial word or phrase and follow that directly with a question mark (?) or an asterisk sign (*).

For example, the search Hills? or Hills* will return the following results:

Farmington Hills
Beverly Hills
Hillsman
Dix Hills

Boolean Operators

Boolean operatiors such as the plus sign (+) and the minus sign (-) are supported.  See the following examples below:

Michael + Murphy, will return all instances where the word "Michael" or "Murphy" appears.
Murphy - Michael, will return all Murphy results minus the results for Michael.

Punctuation

Most punctuation in search criteria is ignored with a few exceptions:

(" ")     - quotes return results with the specific phrase entered
(*), (?) - are used as truncation devices or wild cards as described above
(+)       - is a boolean operator used to find an instance of a phrase, not an exact phrase.
(-)        - another boolean operator used to subtract results from search criteria.