The Basics of Our Search

Basic Search

To enter a query, just type in a few descriptive words and hit the 'enter' key (or click on the Search button) for a list of relevant pages.

Our search uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. For instance, when our search analyzes a page, it assigns higher relevance to pages in which your query terms appear near each other.

Automatic "and" Queries

By default, our search only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. To restrict a search further, just include more terms.

What is a stop word?

Our search ignores common words and characters (known as stop words) as they tend to slow down searches without improving the quality of the results. Terms such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters, are not included in searches.

See your search terms in context

Each search result contains at least one excerpt from the found web page, which shows how your search terms are used in context on that page. Your search terms are bolded so you can tell at a glance whether the result is a page you want to visit.

Does our search use stemming?

 Our search allows one to find same words with different endings. For example, it will also try to find the word "test" if "testing" or "tests" is given in search query.

Does capitalization matter?

The searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington", "George Washington", and "gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN" will all return the same results.