How to use Search :

1. Type keywords, phrases or questions in the search box.
2. Press the Search button to start your search.

The search service responds with a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

Here's an example:

1. Type computer science mailing list in the search box.
2. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
3. The Results page will show you pages on our site about mailing lists for computer science.

Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.

More Basics - An Overview

Here's a quick overview of the rest of our Basic Help. Just click on the links to jump to these sections.

What is a Word?
What is a Phrase?
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Requiring or Excluding Words
Expanding your search using Wildcards

What is a Word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

What is a Phrase?

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.

Example #1: To find lyrics by the King, type "you ain't nothing but a hound dog" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Example #2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999 9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR".

Requiring or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find recipes for cookies with oatmeal but without raisins, try "recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin".

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * at the end of a keyword, you can search for the word with multiple endings.

Example: Try wish*, to find wish, wishes, wishful, wishbone, and wishy-washy.