Tips for Entering Search Criteria

Search Tips

The Single-Word Search:
The most straightforward search is the single-word search. Just enter a key word that you think appears somewhere in the document you're trying to find. WebFind will scour the documents looking for that word, and it will display a link to every document that mentions the word.

Using "AND" Searches:
To narrow your searches, you can ask WebFind to look for documents that contain two or more words. For example, if you enter ben jerry as your search text, WebFind will only match those documents that contain both the word "ben" and the word "jerry." Note that the words don't have to appear together in the document, and they don't have to appear in the order you enter them.

Using "OR" Searches:
Alternatively, you may prefer to search for documents that contain one word or another. For example, you might want to find all documents that contain the word "Penn" or the word "Teller." To do this, you'd enter the following as your search string:

penn or teller

Using "NOT" Searches:
Sometimes you may want to find documents that don't contain a particular word. For example, suppose you want to find all the pages that contain the word "Internet" but not the word "Explorer." In that case, you'd enter the following as your search criteria:

internet not explorer

Combining Search Types:
For true searching fun, you can combine "AND," "OR," and "NOT" searches. Consider the following search string:

florence and (dante or botticelli) and not medici

This long-winded string will find all the pages that contain the word "florence" and either the word "dante" or the word "botticelli," but not the word "medici." Whew!

Using Wildcards:
WebFind supports wildcard characters, but only the asterisk (*) and only at the end of a word. So, for example, you could find all those documents that contain words beginning with "hack" by entering the followiung search string:

hack*

That's it. Happy searching!