Search Rules

This search engine helps you find documents on this Web site. Here's how it works: you tell the search service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

How To Use:

1. Type your keywords in the search box.
2. Press the Search button to start your search.

Here's an example:

1. Type "Steinlen" in the search box.
2. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
3. The Results page will show you numerous pages about Steinlen.

Even though the number of results might be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.

What is an Index?

Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages and discussion group pages from around the world. The 'index' becomes larger every day as people send us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have technology that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When you use our search service, you search the entire collection using keywords or phrases.

What is a Word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

What is a Phrase?

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use " quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.

Example #1: To find information about the most influential graphic designers, type "most influential graphic designers" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Example #2: Try searching for 1-888-304-7843 instead of 1 888 304 7843. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur" and uppercase "FUR".

By default, all searches are accent insensitive as well. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like õ.

Including or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find a poster by "Mucha" containing the word "Job" but without flowers, try "mucha +job -flower".

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * at the end of a keyword, you can search for the word with multiple endings.

Example: You would use wish*, to find wish, wishes, wishful, wishbone, and wishy-washy.

Title & Text Searches

You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on this site:

title:text
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:Cappiello would find pages with Cappiello in the title.

text:text
Finds pages that contain the specified text in any part of the page other than an image tag, link, or URL. The search text:Mucha would find all pages with the term Mucha in them.