Tips On Searching

• Basic searching
• Combining search terms
• Excluding terms
• Refining your search
• How search results are listed
• What is an article U.R.L.?

Basic searching

The simplest search is to enter words or phrases that you want to find. If you enter multiple words or phrases separated by commas, the search engine will find all articles or ads that contain any of those words. For example, you might enter:

United Way, philanthropy

The search engine will also give you related words and phrases. For example, a search for meet will also return items that contain meet or meeting. If you want to limit your search to an exact word or phrase, put it in double quotation marks: "meet."

Combining search terms

A simple query such as United Way, charity will return items about about United Way, about charity, and about both. If you want to find only articles that contain both terms, you can use and to be more specific. You could enter:

United Way and charity

If you want to actually search for the word and as part of a phrase, place it inside quotation marks. For example, to search for the phrase charities and foundations, you would enter:

charities "and" foundations

You might want to specifically exclude certain items from your search. For example, you might want to see those that mention the Ford Foundation but not the Salvation Army. You could enter:

ford foundation not salvation army

Refining your search

Here are some other ways you can refine your search:

Asterisk: If you are not sure how a word is spelled or want to be sure to catch all variations of a word, you can use an asterisk. For example, philanthrop* would find articles or ads containing philanthropy, philanthopist, philanthropic, etc. The asterisk can be used at the beginning or the end of a word.

Question mark: You can use a question mark to replace specific characters if you are not sure of the spelling or want to be sure to catch multiple variations. For example, princip??s would find items containing both principles and principals.

<near>: Searches for two words near one another. For example, United <near> Way will search for the word United close to Way.

<sentence>: Searches for two words in the same sentence. For example, charitable <sentence> contributions.

<paragraph>: Searches for two words in the same paragraph. For example, planned <paragraph> giving.

Note: In searches using near, sentence, or paragraph, the closer the two words are to each other, the higher the article or ad will appear in a list that is ranked by relevance. Note also that near, sentence, and paragraph must be enclosed in angle brackets.

How search results are listed

By default our search program uses "relevance ranking" to display results. That is, those documents that have the most words that match your search terms are presented first. Those with the fewest (which are often only marginally relevant) are at the bottom of the list. The higher the percentage displayed before the title, the more relevant the article or ad.

You may choose to have results displayed in "reverse date ranking." Here the results are listed newest to oldest. Just check the appropriate box on the search page.

What is an article U.R.L.?

U.R.L. stands for uniform resource locator. It's Web lingo for addresses (like http://philanthropy.com). Checking the option box marked "Include article U.R.L.'s" will force the search engine to show you the Web address of each article or ad. You might find this useful if, for example, you want to send the address to a colleague.