Advanced searching

Our search engine has some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

Translated: require Council, require meeting

Finds "Council Meeting", "Council meeting", and "meeting of Council".

Does not find the lowercase "council meeting", nor the abbreviated "Council meet".

Translated: forbid Council, require meetings

Finds "Branch meetings", "SIG meetings", and lowercase "council meetings".

Does not find "Council rules" nor "Council meetings".

Translated: prefer Council, require meetings

Finds "Branch meetings", "Council meetings", and "Council Meetings".

Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.

Translated: require the phrase "Council meetings"

Finds "Council meetings".

Does not find "Council Meetings" nor "meetingss of Council".

Translated: require council (case insensitive), require words starting with "memb"

Finds "Council members", "council membership", "Council member".

The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.

Translated: require Venus (case sensitive), require pictures, forbid planet, prefer images

First lists "pictures and images of Venus", then "Venus pictures".

Does not list lowercase "venus picture", nor forbidden "picture of planet Venus".

Translated: ignores common words like where, is, and the - requires words containing "frog"

Finds "frog", "frogleg", and "bullfrog".

To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *frog*?".

Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive.

A search on "usa" will match "Usa", "USA", and "usA", while the term "USA" matches only its uppercase version.

The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.

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The Xavatoria Search Engine is Copyright 1997 by Fluid Dynamics.