Composing a query:

Words separated by spaces or ordinary punctuation (which is not listed as a special character in the tables later in this section) are treated as a phrase. The search will only return documents that contain this phrase. However, words within the phrase which are listed in the noise list (such as a, as, and, but, for, etc.) are ignored completely. Matching is also case-insensitive. So searching for the State and the Country will also match the state of a country.

To search for a phrase that contains quotation marks, or one of the special characters such as an exclamation mark, you have to enclose the whole phrase in quotation marks, and then place double quotation marks where you want a quotation mark to appear. For example, "he yelled ""Hello!"" from across the street".

To search for several individual words in a document, we seperate the words with a comma. The result will be documents that contain all, or only some, of the words listed. The more that match, however, the better the ranking of the result.

Other than that, you can use the normal wildcard and Boolean operators. An asterisk matches any number of characters, and a question mark matches any single characters. There's also the option of a fuzzy search. Adding two asterisks to the end of a word will match 'stem words' with the same meaning. A search for catch**, for instance, will include catching and caught.

To combine words in the search string, use Boolean operators like this: