Just as no two snowflakes are alike, no two search engines are alike. If you are having trouble with our search engine, keep in mind these few specific tips:

• Our search engine supports case sensitive searching.

• If your search returned too many results, you may need to refine it with double quotes, or by using the word AND.

• If you didn't get enough results, broaden your search by using OR.

• It is also good to keep in mind that our results are ranked by frequency, placement and proximity.

If you are having trouble with your search, here are a few specific examples for refining or broadening your search horizons.

• When I refined my search to include double quotes, I still couldn't find what I was looking for but I know I read the article yesterday.

• What other mistakes could I be making that might be limiting my search when I need it to be broader?

• What are the easiest ways to broaden my search?

• I've broadened my search but now I only seem to have superfilous results.

Terms

AND – putting an AND between two words in a search indicates that you are looking for articles containing both words. (ex/ peanut butter AND jelly). In our search, spaces are treated as ANDs automatically.

Case sensitivity - Case sensitivity occurs when a search engine recognizes capitalized letters differently from lowercase letters. With case sensitive searches, results will not include matches of searched words that do not have identical capitalization, but will find all matches including the searched words typed in lowercase.

Double quotes – (") placing a set of words inside double quotes will request that the search engine finds results that only contain those words in the exact order they are typed.

Frequency - Frequency refers to the number of times a word or phrase appears in a document. Higher rankings are given articles in which the query terms appear more often.

OR – An OR search is a search that looks for any combination of the words typed into the search box. This includes results that may contain only one of the words searched as well as results containing all words somewhere in the article.

Phrase – Searching for a phrase means you are looking for an exact combination of words. Results will contain articles where all the words in the phrase appear in the order requested.

Placement – Placement refers to where the query terms are located in the document body. Higher rankings are given to articles in which the query terms are placed closer to the beginning of the text.

Proximity – Proximity is applied on multi-word queries and refers to how close together the words appear in each article. Higher rankings are given to articles in which the words are closer together, with highest ranking to words that appear together in the same order as listed in the query.

Ranking – All search results are given a ranking that determines their placement in the list of articles. Results with the highest rankings will appear at the top of the list. Our search ranks articles depending on three main factors – frequency, placement and proximity.

FAQ

• When I refined my search to include double quotes, I still couldn't find what I was looking for but I know I read the article yesterday.

Our search engine treats any words typed into the search box inside of double quotes as a phrase. What this means is that you are searching for only those particular words in the exact order you've typed them. If you can't find results without using double quotes, then chances are you won't find results by limiting the search further. For instance, if you search for 'rocky balboa animated doll' and find nothing, putting the phrase in qotations will only make it harder to find.

• What other mistakes could I be making that might be limiting my search when I need it to be broader?

Our search supports case sensitivity. Capitalizing any letter will restrict all the results to that exact capitalization. So if you are looking for a 'Rocky Balboa animated doll,' but you search for a 'Rocky Balboa Animated Doll' even though the words are all there and all spelled correctly, the case sensitive search will only match articles with these words in exactly the same case, suppressing potentially appropriate articles.

However, an all lowercase query will prompt the search engine to ignore case in matching, subsequently expanding the number of articles returned. It is a good idea to avoid mixing cases if you are having problems finding an appropriate article.

• What are the easiest ways to broaden my search?

The most specific search you can run is a case specific phrase search. To make your results broader, don't use capitalization and don't use double quotes. If you’re still having difficulty locating what you need, try using a comma between words to run an OR search.

• I've broadened my search but now I only seem to have superfilous results.

In a broadened search, there will definately be a lot of information. That is the goal. Sifting through the results may be discouraging. If you searched for 'balboa, rocky' but seem to only have results focusing on the tumultuous times of Panamanian currency, it could be those articles are simply ranked higher than what you are looking for. Also, there comes a time when you must consider that what you're looking for may not be on our site. Not all articles are available for an infinite ammount of time.