Advanced Search Search Tips
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Advanced Search Search Tips
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The Senate web-site search feature is made possible by products developed by Google. This reference file explains the search syntax for the Google Search service. Most of these topics are documented on the Google web site at: http://www.google.com/help/index.html. They are assembled in this file for your convenience.
To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the Enter key or click the Search button for a list of relevant results.
Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. For instance, Google analyzes not only the candidate page, but also the pages linking into it to determine the value of the candidate page for your search. Google also prefers pages in which your query terms are near each other.
Note: Encrypted, viewable PDF documents are converted to HTML for indexing; however, the HTML is not displayed.
A single spelling suggestion is returned with the results for queries where the spell checker has detected a possible spelling mistake.
The spell checker feature is context sensitive. For example, if the query submitted is "gail divers," "gail devers" is suggested as an alternative query. However, "scuba divers" would not return an alternate query suggestion.
Note: Currently, the spell checker supports only US English.
Synonyms are other words that have the same or similar meanings. They are displayed as "Other suggested searches" on the results page.
The Sort by Date feature sorts and presents your search results based on date. The date of each file is returned in the results. Results that do not contain dates are displayed at the end, sorted by relevance.
By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. For example, to search for engineering product specification documents, enter:
To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms.
Google supports the logical "OR" operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR" between terms. For example, to search for an office in either London or Paris, enter:
Every Senate Search result lists one or more excerpts from the web page to display how your search terms are used in context on that page. In the excerpt, your search terms are displayed in bold text so that you can quickly determine if that result is from a page you want to visit.
Senate Searches are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington," "George Washington," and "George washington" all return the same results.
Google ignores common words and characters known as stop words. These include most pronouns and articles. Google automatically disregards such terms as "where" and "how," as well as certain single digits and single letters. These terms rarely help to narrow a search and can significantly slow searching. If you want to use stop words in your search, use the "+" sign or enclose your phrase containing stop words in quotation marks. Make sure that you include a space before the "+" sign.
For example, to search for Annual Report Version I:
You can also include the "+" sign in phrase searches.
To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. Rather, Senate Searches for exactly the words that you enter into the search box.
For example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not yield "airline" or "airlines.". If in doubt, try both forms, for example: "airline" and "airlines."
Since Google only returns web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a specific subset of the pages that were returned by your original broad query.
You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign.
For example, the search:
will return pages about bass that do not contain the word "music."
You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.
Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes because they join your search words in the same way double quotes join your search words. For example, the search:
is treated as a phrase search even though the search words are not enclosed in double quotes. Google recognizes hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes as phrase connectors.