• Quotation marks – If you place multiple words within quotation marks, it will search the case for that complete phrase e.g. “Joe Curran”
  • Wildcard Searches – use the * or ? symbols (you can’t start a search with a wildcard character) 
    • * to search for multiple characters e.g. “note*” to return notepad or notebook 
    • ? to search for a single character  e.g. “SA? 4BQ” where you’re not sure of the third character 
  • Boolean operators – how to use standard AND, OR, NOT in your searches 
    • To search for both terms: 
      • type the word AND e.g. hotel AND pool (note AND all in caps) 
      • use double &&’s e.g. hotel && pool 
      • or you can use the + symbol e.g. hotel + pool 
    • To search for one or other term: 
      • leave it as a gap e.g. bar pool 
      • type the word OR e.g. “bar” OR “pool” (note OR all in caps) 
      • use double pipe e.g. bar || pool 
    • To search for one term but not the other 
      • Use an exclamation mark to make it NOT e.g. Bar !pool 
      • Or use the word NOT e.g. Bar NOT pool (note NOT all in caps) 
  • Fuzzy Search – using the tilde “~” symbol allows you to return results that are matches of words that have a similar construction such as 
    • Blue~ would return blue or blues or glue (tilde on its own returns results with just one character different) 
    • Bloom~2 would return Bloomed, Gloomy (tilde with a number will return results with two character different) 
  • Proximity Search – when you use the tilde “~” in combination with the quotation marks, you can find results for terms that are close to each other. 
    • “hotel airport”~5 will return results where the words hotel and airport appear within 5 words of each other in a document e.g. Sheraton Hotel located near the Airport
    • Term boosting – boosting allows you to search for multiple words, but show results that have a particular term in higher up the results by virtue of using a circumflex together with a number e.g. Knife^2 Weapon – would return results that have the word knife higher up the listing than those with the word weapon. 
  • Regular Expressions – A regular expression search finds a match based on the contents between forward slashes “/” 
    • /[mh] otel/ would find results for motel or hotel. (Other standard regular expressions could be used)