Search Hints

• The Stone Center guide to the web search engine is a simple search. The term that is typed into the search box is applied verbatim to the title and description of Stone Center guide to the Web data topics.



• The search terms are not case sensitive. For example, typing "martin luther king" or "MARTIN LUTHER KING" will yield the same results.



• Surrounding portions of your search with double quotes will cause the search to only return results that contain the exact phrase inside the quotes. So searching for "african studies" with quotes around it would only return entries with the words african and studies immediately next to eachother, whereas searching for african studies without quotes would return any entry with the words african and studies anywhere in the title or description.



• The button selection below the search term box, labeled "contains" or "starts with" will yield different results. For example, typing "unc" with the "contains" button selected will search and return results that contain the letters "unc" anywhere in the title or description, such as "lunch" and "uncle". However, if the "starts with" button is selected, the search engine would then return results in which the letters "unc" begin a word, such as "uncle" or "unclear".



• When performing a truncated search, simply entering the beginning of a word will suffice; you do not need to use a wildcard character such as an asterisk. For example, entering "hist" will return results including "history", "historic", "historical", etc.



• You can use multiple search terms in one search. If the results received are not as expected, however, try using the search terms separately. When two or more words are entered in succession, the search engine will look for those words as a phrase. For example, typing "harlem renaissance" will return only results in which the word "harlem" is immediately followed by the word "renaissance." However, typing "harlem" alone will yield results that may have been omitted from the previous search.



• You must not use quotation marks, boolean operators, or any other unconventional characters with the Stone Center guide to the Web search feature! Unconventional characters, such as: ; , * , > , < , etc. will be filtered out of your search.



• Because some items span multiple topics, it is possible that your search may return duplicate results. The associated link, however, will be identical.

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