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Single-Character Wildcard Search
The "?" symbol will match any one character. For instance:
The search term
gra?e
will return results for "grace", "grade", "grape", "graze", and others.
NOTE: The "?" character cannot be used at the beginning of words.
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Multi-Character Wildcard Search
The "*" symbol will match with zero or more characters. For instance:
The search term
engineer*
will return results for "engineer", "engineered", "engineering", and others.
The search term
d*y
will return results for "day", "daily", "density", "delivery", "discovery", and others.
NOTE: The "*" character cannot be used at the beginning of words.
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Fuzzy/Similar Search
We support searching for similarly spelled words using the fuzzy/similar search character, "~". This character always goes at the end of a word.
The search term
road~
will return results for "roads", "load", "loads", "toad", "toads" and others.
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Proximity Search
You can search for words that must be within a certain distance of each other. Including the "~" symbol followed by a number at the end of a pair of words will return results where the two words are within the specified number of words of each other.
The search term
"teach engineering"~15
will return results where the word "teach" and the word "engineering" are within fifteen words of each other.
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Prohibitive/Exclusion Search
The symbols "-" and "!" both exclude terms from a search. When either symbol is placed before a word, any documents containing that word will be excluded from the results.
The search term
water !bottle
will return results for documents that contain the word "water", but not the word "bottle".
The search term
physics -math
will return results for documents that contain the word "physics", but not the word "math".
