If you've used a search engine like Google then you may be familiar with advanced searching using search expressions.

Search expressions  use symbols (e.g. *., ?) and operators (e.g. AND, OR and NOT) in the keyword search area and help retrieve more precise results.

For example if your search is returning too many hits, you can put words in "quotations" to return those exact words or phrase.

If you type several words without quotations around them, the system will search for items that contain any of those words. This means you can return a lot of items, however those items that contain most or all of your search terms are placed at the top of the list.

Using AND, OR and NOT

Example 1 AND

word1 AND word2

This will search for all items that contain both word1 and word2.

Note when you enter a  sequence of words without operators the system will use AND.  A search for "student health care" translates to "students  AND health AND care".

Example 2 NOT

word1 NOT word2

This will search for occurences of  word1 but would exclude items which contain word2.  You can also use the symbol  - ( leading hyphen) placed before the word (e.g. -word2) to replace NOT.

Example 3 OR

word1 OR word2

This will search for occurences of  word1 and will also return any items that also contain word2.

Using parentheses

Example 1

((word1 AND word2) OR word3)

This will return items containing word1 and word2 or just items that contain the term word3.

Using wild cards

Example 1 *

wh*

which returns all words that begin with "wh" such as what, why, whether, when.

Example 2 ?

Wee?

which returns all words that begin with "Wee" and have one more character such as weep, week, weed.

Note  wild cards cannot be used at the beginning of a search phrase ?eek is an illegal search term and will be ignored.

Using quotation marks

Example 1

"carpet python" OR frogs

will search for all occurences of the phrase "carpet python" or of the word frogs.

Mixing search options

All of these advanced search options can be mixed together. 

Example 1 

((bob AND uncle) AND NOT Zoo*)

will return all items that contain the terms bob and uncle but will not include any items that contain words that start with  Zoo like Zoologist, Zoology or Zoo itself.

Example 2

snakes OR frogs -"carpet python"

will return all items  which contain the word snakes or frogs but do not contain the phrase "carpet python".