Basic Search Tips

Still feeling nervous about your searching “skills”? Don’t be silly! It only gets easier from now on… Remember your earliler search for LOGOS? Well, with these tips you will very likely eliminate hits of companies that are trying to sell you a logo for your company, company that you don't own...at least not yet!

• If you want to make sure a word is either included or excluded from the search, then you musts use the plus (+) and minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches with NO space between the sign and the keyword

.
EXAMPLE:   +cookies  -chocolate
(NO space between the sign and the keyword)
 

• If you want to make sure your search phrase is found exactly as is, you must use quotation marks around the entire phrase.
  EXAMPLE:   "I fell in love with a beautiful stranger"
  (Do NOT put quotation marks around a single word.)
   
• Put your most important keywords first in the string.
  EXAMPLE:   dog breed family pet choose
   
• Do not type search in capital letters since it will return only exact matches. Type keywords and phrases in lower case to find both lower and upper case versions.
  EXAMPLE:   governor retrieves both governor and Governor
   
• Use truncation (or stemming) and wildcards (e.g., *) to look for variations in spelling and word form.
  EXAMPLE:    librar* returns library, libraries, librarian, etc.
  EXAMPLE:    colo*r returns color (American spelling) and colour (British spelling)
   
• Combine phrases with keywords, using the double quotes and the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs.
  EXAMPLE:  +cowboys +"wild west" -football -dallas
  (In this case, if you use a keyword with a +sign, you must put the +sign in front of the phrase as well. When searching for a phrase alone, the +sign is not necessary.)