The text search engine allows queries to be formed from arbitrary Boolean expressions containing the keywords "AND", "OR",and "NOT", and grouped with parentheses.

• You can also use * as a wildcard returning many forms of a word.
• This Search supports the standard Boolean operators and syntax: And (and, &); Or (or, |); Not (and not, &!); and related precedence operators such as (), "", etc.
• Search is not case sensitive: you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.
• You may search for any word except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words). Words in the exception list are ignored during a search. (Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in Exact Phrase searches.)
• Punctuation marks such as the period ( . ), colon ( : ), semicolon ( ; ), and comma ( , ) are ignored during a search.
• To use specially-treated characters ( ( & ), ( | ), ( ^ ), ( # ), ( @ ), ( $ ), ( ( ), ( ) ) ) in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks ( " ).

For example:

act*

finds documents containing words starting with 'act', like acts, acting, actor, actress, activate, etc.

*act

finds documents containing words ending with 'act', like contact, contract, fact, etc.

*act*

finds documents containing words beginning or ending with 'act', like actor, contact, actress, facts, activate, contract, etc.

information retrieval

finds documents containing 'information' or 'retrieval'

information or retrieval

same as above

information and retrieval

finds documents containing both 'information' and 'retrieval'

information not retrieval

finds documents containing 'information' but not 'retrieval'

(information not retrieval) and WAIS

finds documents containing 'WAIS', plus 'information' but not 'retrieval'