Tips for Searching

Tips for Searching

WV Office of Miners' Health Safety and Training Home Page

At its simplest, a site search, or query, can be just a word or a phrase. For example, to search for this page (Tips for searching), you might enter: searching, query, or search tips.

With the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your query to give you more complete results.

Multiple consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in the same order within a matching document.
Queries are not case-sensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.
You can look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query form type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.
Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.
Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, system and manager and system near manager, look for the words system and manager on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.
Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of surfing but not surfing the Net, write the following query:

surfing AND NOT the Net
Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:
Abbott OR Costello

This query finds all pages that mention Abbott or Costello or both.
Put quotation marks around keywords if you want to find them literally. For instance, if you type the following query:

"system near manager"
The search engine will literally look for the complete phrase system near manager. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks:

system near manager
The engine searches all documents for the words system and manager.
To use special characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks.

These hints will get you started, but for more complex queries and more examples, refer to the complete Microsoft Query Language documentation at the State of West Virginia home page.