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:
Translated: require Sacramento, require State
Finds "Sacramento State", "Sacramento State", and "State of type Sacramento".
Does not find the lowercase "Sacramento State", nor the abbreviated "Sacramento State".
Translated: forbid Sacramento, require State
Finds "CSU State", and lowercase "Sacramento State".
Does not find "Sacramento definitions" nor "Sacramento State".
Translated: prefer Sacramento, require State
Finds "Perl State", "Sacramento State", and "Sacramento State".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.
Translated: require the phrase "Sacramento State"
Finds "Sacramento State".
Does not find "Sacramento Scripts" nor "State of type Sacramento".
Translated: require Sacramento (case insensitive), require words starting with "State"
Finds "Sacramento State", "Sacramento State", "Sacramento State".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.
First lists "pictures and images of Venus", then "Venus pictures".
Does not list lowercase "venus picture", nor forbidden "picture of planet Venus".
Translated: ignores common words like where, is, and the - requires words containing "frog"
Finds "frog", "frogleg", and "bullfrog".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *frog*?".
Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive.
A search on "usa" will match "Usa", "USA", and "usA", while the term "USA" 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.