General search tips

Keep it simple

The simpler your wording, the easier it will be for our search engine to interpret, and find, your term.

Spelling

Your search may have failed because of a simple typing or spelling error. Double-check your spelling before launching your search, or try the OR operator for alternatives (see Advanced tips).

Be specific

Avoid being too general. If there is some further words that are related to your search, add them (see Advanced tips). Placing a phrase or expression between parentheses will also make your query more precise.

Explore the links

Sometimes a search result may not have exactly what you seek, but its links may have interesting references to relevant pages. Explore these as they may spare you the effort of further searching.

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Advanced tips

The search engine has extra commands that enable you to specify and limit the scope of your search by defining logical relationships between words. They can also be combined for more complex searches:

With any of the words: | 

The pipe symbol (shift \) tells the search engine to find all documents containing at least one of the terms in your query. Uses of ‘|’ could be to find multiple spellings of words or even similar concepts. For example:
 Peking Beijing   Peking | Beijing 

With all of the words:  + 

The plus symbol tells the search engine to only find documents with all words present. If you enter multiple words without +, the search engine will find all occurrences of all the words (unless enclosed by quotes). For example:
 Crowe +Gladiator 

With the exact phrase: " "

To search for an expression composed of several words (for example, the title of a program or a person’s name), put it between quotation marks. This prevents the search engine launching a search on each separate word. For example:
 "Australia All Over" 

Without the words: – 

Using the minus symbol tells the search engine to exclude pages without a word from your query. For example:
 star -wars 

Combinations

More complex queries can be launched by “nesting” combinations of words and specifying logical relationships between them. (Remembering that the simpler your wording, the easier it will be for the search engine to interpret it.) For example, to launch a search on juvenile crime around the world, excluding the United States, your query may look like:
[juvenile | teenage] +[crime | delinquency] -"United States" 

Wildcards:  * 

Many words have the same beginning but a different ending. To search for all occurrences of a word, use the asterisk. For example, for all pages that contain art, arts, artist, artistry, etc., enter the query:
 art* 

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Additional features

Search by gateway

If you are looking for a particular word within an ABC Online site, you can narrow your query by telling the search engine where to look. For example, a search for a story about bioethics at the science gateway, would look like:
 w:science +bioethics 

Multimedia

You can search for pages that have links to video or audio files. For example, to find the streaming audio for ABC NewsRadio, in either RealPlayer or Windows Media Player format, your query may look like:
 newsradio +[h:ram | h:asx]