Wildcards

To use a wildcard, type an * [asterisk] to take the place of any number of letters at the end of a word. This will ask the search engine to return all pages that contain words that start with the letters you specified.

For example, if you are searching for information about somebody called “Juliette Barbrough”, but you are not sure how to spell the name, then you can type just the parts that you remember, such as:

• Juliette Barb*
• Juliet* Barbrough

Both of these queries would find references to “Juliette Barbrough”. But, because wildcard searches are more general, you may find many pages that are not relevant. For example, searching for “Barb*” would find pages that mention “Barbrough”, but also those that mention “Barbados”.

Sentence Search

Sentence search enables you to make very precise search queries by enclosing full phrases in double-quotes. For example, by enclosing “the missing link” in double-quotes, you will only find pages that include this precise phrase, not those that happen to have one or more of these words somewhere on the page.

Even if you do not use double-quotes, the search will still notice when it finds the exact phrase entered into the query. Pages that include the exact phrase will be ranked highly in the result list.

An important thing to keep in mind when using sentence search is that the search engine maintains a list of “ignored words” for most languages where it is relevant to do so. These are words that appear very often in a given language such as articles (a, an, the), conjunctions (and, or, but), forms of “to be” (is, was, are, etc.) and other common words. These are words that are likely to appear on a large portion, if not all, pages.Therefore, these words are ignored when they appear in the query; otherwise, a search including one of these words, such as “bacon and eggs”, would return all pages that include the word "and”, even though the user is obviously only interested in “bacon” and “eggs”. The sentence search feature interprets all ignored words as though the were the same word, so it would identify both “bacon and eggs” and “bacon or eggs” as a phrase match for “bacon and eggs”.