Customer service hours:
7:00AM - 6:00PM CST (M-F)

Inside North America:
1-800-815-9627

Outside North America:
1-205-408-4958

At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your query to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started with basic query language and acquaint you with the full power of the search engine.

Boolean and Proximity Operators
The Proximity operator NEAR, allows you to locate items containing specific words or phrases located near one another. Boolean operators, however, allow you to use the words AND, OR, and NOT to locate items containing specific words. Boolean and proximity operators cannot be searched for since they are considered reserved words by the search engine. In addition, very common words, such as the and is are considered "noise" words by the search engine and are eliminated from the criteria before the search is performed.

More Tips:

• Look for words with the same prefix.
  Example - type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.

• Search for all forms of a word.
  Example - type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.

• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other.
  Example - type system AND manager or system NEAR manager, to look for the words system and manager in the same field.
  
  But with NEAR, the returned links (hits) are ranked in order of the proximity of the search terms: The closer together the terms are in the searched field, the higher the rank, which causes those hits to be displayed higher in the results list.

• Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text.
  Example - type surfing AND NOT the Net, to find all instances of surfing but not surfing the Net.

• Use OR to find alternate spellings of words.
  Example - type color OR colour to find all instances of either spelling of the word color.

Special Characters

You can enter special characters (such as umlauted characters) into your search criteria by using codes surrounded by square brackets, as follows:

Character	Code
Ä	[Auml]
ä	[auml]
Ë	[Euml]
ë	[euml]
Ï	[Iuml]
ï	[iuml]
Ö	[Ouml]
ö	[ouml]
Ü	[Uuml]
ü	[uuml]

For example, if you wanted to search for the word für, you would enter f[uuml]r in your search criteria.

Note that if your keyboard has keys for the special characters you can use those keys to enter the characters directly, i.e. you do not have to use the codes.

Query Limitations

Please note the following limitations when constructing queries for the search engine:

• The search engine ignores Noise Words and Noise Characters:
  Noise Words and Noise Characters are common words (such as the and of) and common characters (such as &) that are NOT indexed. The search engine ignores these words and characters if you use them in a query. For example, if you search for "Quality of Life", the search engine will "throw out" the word of before performing the search.

• Begins With option forces an exact match:
  If you turn on the Begins With option, the search engine ignores all advanced features (such as Boolean logic) except the wildcard character and treats your search criteria as a phrase that must appear at the beginning of the field you are searching.

These hints will get you started, but for more complex queries and more examples, see the Query Language page on Microsoft's site.