Advanced Searching

Boolean Searches

• Use a question mark – ? – to replace single characters eg aldre? will find Aldred and Aldreg.
• Use an asterisk – * – to pick up variant spellings eg Hi*s will find Hicks or Hills. Hi*s* will find Hiscock, Hinds as well as Hicks.
• Use “quotation marks” to find exact phrases
• A NOT search requires a two step process: first search the main word e.g. “Hicks” then exclude the unwanted references using an exclamation mark – ! – in front of the word to be excluded e.g.”!William”

Fuzzy Searches

• Use tilde ~ symbol to find a similar word eg hick~  gives Vick, Kick and Rick.
• Use tilde ~ plus a number eg hick~2 will match terms like Bock, Beck as well as Hicks where two letters have changed.

Proximity Searches

• Use the tilde ~ and a numeric value for a proximity search eg “whitby pepper”~20 will search “whitby” and “pepper” within 20 words of each other in a document.