Search Tips

An AnswerBook search can be as simple as a single key word or phrase. However, the underlying technology can also be used to produce much more powerful and focused requests. Here are a few of the methods you can use:

The easiest approach is to check off the "Free Text Query" box and simply phrase the question as you would normally: How do I center text in Write Ease?. The search engine will automatically determine which words to use in a natural-language question like this and begin the search.

If you'd like to search for several concepts which start with the same few letters, try using the * wildcard. For instance key* will find hits on AnswerBook pages with the words key, keyboard, and keystroke.

You can also search for all grammatical forms of a word, using the wildcard **. A search on sink** will return pages with sink, sinking, and sunk.

Of course, if you're accustomed to the power of 'boolean' searches, you can use those to search the AnswerBook, as well. The keywords NEAR, AND, NOT, and OR are all supported. NEAR is especially powerful, since you may only be interested in documents where a pair of terms are within a few words of each other, rather than simply both present somewhere in the document.

If you only want to see pages that include an entire phrase, enclose the phrase in quotation marks: "system administrator" will return pages with that phrase on them, but will not return a page which contains a phrase like ...the administrator was using the system...