Search Help

To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more detailed your query, the more relevant your results.

Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

For the most accurate searches, ALWAYS use lowercase letters for all keywords.

Translated: require King, require salmon

Finds "King salmon", "King Salmon".
Does not find the lowercase "king".

Translated: forbid king, require salmon

Finds "coho salmon", "sockeye salmon", "chum salmon", "silver salmon", and "Salmon".

Translated: prefer king, require salmon

Finds "king salmon", "King Salmon", "chum salmon", "pink salmon", "sockeye salmon", "coho salmon".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.

Translated: require the phrase "king salmon"

Finds "king salmon", "King salmon", and "King Salmon".

Translated: require king (case insensitive), require words starting with "fish", example: fishing, fishery

Finds "king fishing", "king fishery".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.

Translated: require Kodiak (case sensitive), require pictures, forbid kenai, prefer images

First lists "pictures and images of Kodiak", then "Kodiak pictures".
Does not list lowercase "kodiak picture", nor forbidden "picture of kenai".

Translated: ignores common words like where, is, and the - requires words containing "eagle"

Finds "eagle", "Eagle", and "bald eagle".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *eagle*?".

Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive.

A search on "kenai" will match "Kenai", "KENAI", and "kenai", while the term "KENAI" matches only its uppercase version.

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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