![]() Within or W# searches for your two keywords in the order of your search string with a maximum number of words between them.Įxample: repressed W8 memory will find articles that have the word repressed first with up to eight words apart from the word memory. Using N# or W# followed by a number tells the computer you want the two search words to be found within a certain number of words of each other. N# (near) and W# (within) are Proximity Operators that will connect words together similar to using the “quotation marks”. Not all search engines or databases accept Proximity Operators so make sure to read the help screen for more advanced help. Proximity (aka positional) Operators are not really part of Boolean Logic, but like Boolean they help formulate search statements. S horting Manufactur* down to Man*, you would receive information about manufacturing, but you would also information about management, manuals, mankind, manipulation, and people named Manuel, etc. Manufactur* will search manufacturing, manufacturer, manufacture, manufactures. Remember not to shorten the search term too much. Thus, you should use only the root word in a search string, but also use a wildcard to indicate that you want articles with all other forms of the word in them. Example: ski? OR ski* - other words that might be used in an article about "ski" are skiing, skier, and skis. If you were to type skier, you would miss all the articles about skiing or people who like to ski. ![]() The * is for truncation or finding all of the various endings a word could have so a search for work * will find all of the words that start with work but have different endings such as work ing, work ed, work horse etc. Generally speaking the ? replaces a letter such as wom ?n will find wom en and wom an. (Note neither symbol can be the first character in your search term). All Rights Reserved.Wild Card and Truncation symbols Searching using ? as a wildcard and * as a truncation symbol allows you to create searches where there are unknown characters, multiple spellings or various endings. You cannot search for a single quotation mark because the search engine uses the symbol as a delimiter.Ĭopyright © 2017 by Pearson Education. For example, the search string the big scaly fish that Uncle Ned caught for supper Tuesday night fails because of the common words included in the search string. Including common words, such as, a, the, an, to, be, of, that, for, and you causes the search to fail. For example, the search string big scaly fish finds only topics with that text. You can place a search string in quotation marks to find the exact string you enter. Topics with the words fish or kittens do not include the word dogs however, dogs might appear in topics where only the word cats was used. In the previous example, the search results includes topics with the words cats and fish or cats and kittens. When parentheses are nested, the inner-most set of parentheses is evaluated first, followed by the next set, and so on. ![]() Parentheses can be nested too, as in cats and (not dogs (fish or kittens)). ![]() For example, the search string cats and (dogs or fish) finds topics with the words cats and dogs, cats and fish, or all three words. You can group search strings with parentheses. Punctuation marks can also be used in place of Boolean keywords, as shown in the following table: Symbol ![]() For example, the search string not dogs or cats and fish locates all topics with the words cats and fish but all topics with the word dogs are omitted. Using the Search All Topics bar, you can locate topics in the Help using Boolean keywords such as not, and, or or. ![]()
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