Search Help

Case Sensitivity

Searches are case insensitive. The query book or BOOK will return the same result.

Partial words

The search matches partial words. Therefore, book will also match books or any other word with "book" in it. There is no word stemming.

Default Search

The default search criteria is "and". For a query consisting of more than one word, search results will list fortunes that contain all the words in query.

For example, the query fortune cookie will return a list of fortunes that contain the words fortune and cookie.

Or Search

You can do an "or" search by inserting "or" in between the words of your query. For example, the query Fortune or Cookie will list fortunes that have the either fortune or cookie or both.

Compound Search

"And" and "or" can be mixed in a query. For example, the equivalent logic for the query fottune cookie or canada is

fortune and cookie or canada

The equivalent logic for the query fortune and cookie or canada is

fortune and and and cookie or canada

Phrase Match

To match a phrase, enclose the phrase in quotes.

For example, the query "simple steps" (with the quotes) will return pages that contain the phrase simple steps with no other words in between.

In contrast, the the query simple steps will return pages in which simple and steps occur any where on the page in any order.

Wild Card Searches

Wild card searches are preformed by including wild card characters in the query. There are two such characters ? and *

The ? is a single character wild card. It matches any character zero or one time only. For example, the query

travel?ed

will match traveled and its alternate travelled.

The * is a multi-character wild card. It matches any character zero or more times. For example, if not sure how "lieutenant" is spelled you could use the query

l*tenant

to search for the word.

Wild card characters are also helpful for matching words whose alternate spelling may contain hyphens. Currently, the * wild card matches up to 10 characters.

Note: Since search matches partial words automatically, wild cards are not necessary at the beginning or the end of a word.

Search Fortunes