Search Help

To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more detailed your query, the more relevant your results.

Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "flood" will match "Flood", "FLOOD", and "FlOoD", while the term "FLOOD" matches only its uppercase version.

The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.

Translated: require AAABA, require baseball

Finds "AAABA Baseball", "AAABA baseball", and "baseball in Johnstown AAABA".
Does not find the lowercase "aaaba baseball", nor the abbreviated "AAABA ball".

Translated: forbid summer, require accommodations

Finds "Accommodations", and lowercase "accommodations".
Does not find "Summer Accommodations" nor "summer accommodations".

Translated: prefer motel, require hotel

Finds "Hotel Motel", "motel", and "hotel".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.

Translated: require the phrase "Johnstown Flood"

Finds "Johnstown Flood".
Does not find "Johnstown flood" nor "floods in Johnstown".

Translated: require flood (case insensitive), require words starting with "johnstown"

Finds "Flood Johnstown", "flood killed many Johnstowners", "JohnstownPA Floods".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.

Translated: require Johnstown (case sensitive), require pictures, forbid flood, prefer images

First lists "pictures and images of Johnstown", then "Johnstown pictures".
Does not list lowercase "johnstown pictures", nor forbidden "picture of Johnstown flood".

Translated: ignores common words like what, is, and a - requires words containing "flood"

Finds "flood", "floods", and "flooding".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "What is a *flood*?".