Refine Your Search

You can significantly improve your QuickFinder™ searches by using operators, switches, and wildcards in your search strings.

For additional search tricks, see Related Topics below.

Using Operators and Switches

Operators and switches can be used in your search strings to help refine the accuracy of search results.

Operators

You can use any of the following operators to refine your searches:

AND (or use an ampersand [&] or a plus sign [+])
OR
NOT (or use a minus sign [-])
" " (quotation marks)

If you wanted to locate documents containing the words apple and orange, you could use the AND operator, as in

apple AND orange

or

apple & orange

QuickFinder would return all documents containing both apple and orange.

HINT: When using the AND, NOT, and OR operators, you must type them in uppercase letters. This is to avoid confusion when you include one of these words as part of a search string.

You can also use the plus sign (+) operator in place of the AND or ampersand operator, or the minus sign (-) operator in place of the NOT operator. For example:

apple + orange

You can also use these signs in searching for multiple words, or to exclude multiple words. For example:

+apple +orange -tomato

Switches

You can further enhance your search by using one of several switches. For example, the /SENTENCE switch instructs QuickFinder to return only documents that contain two or more words, such as apple and orange, in the same sentence:

/SENTENCE (apple AND orange)

For a list of available switches, see Search Proximity.

Using Wildcards

You can use the question mark (?) and asterisk (*) wildcard characters to search for word variations.

For example, if you were unsure if the word you were looking for was WARDEN or WARREN, you could enter WAR???. QuickFinder would return all documents containing any words beginning with WAR and ending with any three letters.

Refer to the following table for a description of both wildcard characters.

Wildcard

Purpose

Example

? (question mark)

Represents any character when you are unsure of the exact character.

Nov???

Could return Novell®, Novels, etc.

* (asterisk)

Returns documents that contain zero or more characters in place of the asterisk.

Net*

Could return NetWare®, Nets, Netscape*, etc.