The search engine has four modes of operation. The first three of these are the easiest to use. with the fourth provides advanced options that can be used to refine your query.
This option will return all the pages in the index that contain any one of the words you enter. For example, if you type foo bar in the search box, the search engine will return documents containing the word 'foo', documents containig the word 'bar', and documents containing both the words.
This option will only return pages that contain every word you typed in the search box. For the same query as above, only documents containing both the words 'foo' and 'bar' would be returned; documents containing only one of the words would not.
This option will only return documents that contain exactly what you typed, character for character, in the search box. Again for our query foo bar, only documents containing 'foo' and 'bar', in that order and with no words between them, would be returned
Here you can specify, using a boolean expression, what documents to return. You can use operators to link search terms, build compound expressions, and group expressions using brackets. Boolean operators must be in upper case (AND not and, OR not or, etc. Here is a list of the operators and examples of how they are used:
AND: The query hardware AND software will return
documents that contain both the words 'hardware' and 'software'OR: The query windows OR linux will return documents
that contain either the words 'windows' or 'linux', and the documents that
contain both wordsNOT: NOT computers will show all paged that do not
contain the word 'computers'XOR: This operator means 'exclusive or', and is similar
to the OR operator, but does not return pages that contain
both of the search terms. perl XOR java will return documents
that contain the words 'perl' or 'java', but will not return documents
containing both of these words
NEAR: This operator works like AND, but in
addition to the document having to contain both of the search terms,
they must also be within 50 characters of each other. Note that you
cannot supply a compound expression to the NEAR operator; the query
CGI NEAR (programs OR scripts) is invalid, use (CGI NEAR
programs) OR (CGI NEAR scripts) instead.NAND, NOR and
XNOR are negated versions of the AND,
OR and XOR operators. For example, NOT
(foo OR bar) is the same as foo NOR bar