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There are five stages to using this search facility:
It is important that you choose what you search for carefully. If, for instance, you choose to search for "Oasis", then you are likely to get a lot of pages listed. It would be better to refine your words and be more specific in what you are looking for, eg., an AND search for "floral industry events" would only show you the pages with 'floral' (or FLORAL, Floral, etc.), 'industry' and 'events' contained within the text.
Special modifers help you to perform more advanced searching. These modifiers work as shown in the examples below. Note that the modifiers may alter the AND/OR choice you might make.
+Floral +resources
meaning: requires floral and requires resources
Finds "Floral resources", "FLORAL Resources" and "resources are available for the floral industry".
Does not find the lowercase "floral resources" (if case is sensitive), nor the abbreviated "Floral resource".
-floral +events
meaning: forbid floral, requires events
Finds "industry events", "events".
Does not find "events for the floral industry" nor "floral events".
or Education and documents
meaning: prefer education, require documents
Finds "Education resources", "documents for florists" and "floristry education documents".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.
"world's best design"
meaning: require the phrase "world's best design"
Finds "world's best design".
Does not find "best designs the world's seen" nor "world's design best".
and facts and Flor*
meaning: requires facts, requires words starting with "flor"
Finds "facts for Florists" (if case sensitive), "floristry facts" (if case insensitive), "floral facts".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.
not plant and flowers and pictures or images
meaning: requires flowers, requires pictures, forbids plant, prefers images
First lists "pictures and images of flowers", then "pictures of flowers".
Does not list uppercase "Pictures of Flowers" (if case sensitive), nor forbidden "plant picture".
Where is the *frog*?
meaning: ignores common words like where, is and the - requires words containing "frog"
Finds "frog", "frogleg" and "bullfrog".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *frog*?".
The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.
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