Search Tips

Click any place in the search box and type a word or phrase that describes the education topic you want to find. Then click on the "Find Documents" command button. The system will display a list of documents that contain these words and order them based on the number of times the word or words appear anywhere in the text.

If you are looking for documents that contain more than one word, use the Boolean operators: and, or, near. If the document must contain each word in the search then use and. If the words should be closely related use near. If any of the words is sufficient, use or. For example, suppose you want to find information on standards and assessments. You can enter in the search box:

The system will list all documents that contain both terms. You may decide to limit the search further since you only are interested in standards and assessments in elementary education. In this case click on New query and enter:

The system will list all documents containing all three terms.

Parentheses affect the selection and will help refine the search. Suppose you want information on either standards or assessments in elementary education. Click on New query and enter:

The system will list all documents containing the words standards and elementary. The system also will list all documents containing the words assessments and elementary.

The near operator refines a search by finding words that are less than 50 words apart in the document. The near operator is of particular value when searching larger documents. Suppose you still want information on either standards or assessments in elementary education. The system lists many documents discussing the three topics: standards, assessments and elementary education, but not standards or assessments in elementary education. Click on New query and enter:

The system will list all documents where standards and elementary are within 50 words of each other. The system also will list all documents where assessments and elementary are within 50 words of each other.

Excluding Words from the Request

You also can exclude documents containing certain words with the Boolean operator and not. Suppose that you want information on all schools except high schools. In this case click on New query and enter:

General Search Rules

The search engine has rules governing word lists, case, special words, special characters and punctuation.

• Multiple consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in the same order within a matching document.

• Requests are not case sensitive, so you can type words in uppercase or lowercase.

• You can search for any word except those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search.

• Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity requests. For example, if you searched for "Word for Windows", the results could give you "Word for Windows" and "Word and Windows", because for is a noise word and appears in the exception list.

• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.

• To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a request, enclose your request in quotation marks (").

• To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, "World-Wide Web or ""Web""" searches for World-Wide Web or "Web".

• The wildcard character (*) can match words with a given prefix. The request esc* matches the terms "ESC," "escape," and so on.