Search Tips

Parital Word (*)

The *, or wildcard, is a powerful feature that allows you to search using a part of a word. If you include * after a word it will find all words starting with this word. Similarly if added to the start of word it will find any word ending with this word. By using it at the start and end of a word it will find any words containing this word.

Examples using the name Benedict:

Please Note that you must use at least four letters for a correct results.

Terms you want to exclude (-)

Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-virus software ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-virus -software ] will search for the words 'anti-virus' but exclude references to software. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ john -smith -doe]. The - sign can be used to exclude more than just words. For example, place a hyphen before the 'site:' operator (without a space) to exclude a specific site from your search results.

The OR operator

The searches default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, [ Byrne Des OR Eoin ] will give you results about either one of the names Byrne Des or Byrne Eoin, whereas [ Byrne Des OR Eoin  ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both names on the same page.