Doc Search Tips

The documentation search engine works a lot like most Web search engines. For a simple keyword search, just type the list of keywords you want to find. The search engine will find pages that contain all of the words you type.

If you want to search for pages that contain any of the words you type, separate the words with OR. (You have to use capital letters, or the search engine will think you just want to search for the word "or".) For example:

   operator OR expression OR assignment

This will match pages with any of these three words. OR applies to the immediately adjacent words only:

   operator OR expression assignment

This searches for pages that contain either "operator" or "expression", and which also contain "assignment".

By default, the search engine looks for common variations on the words you type, such as plurals of nouns or past-tense versions of verbs. For example, if you type "operator", the engine will match "operators", "operate", and "operated" as well. (This is sometimes called "stemming," because the engine searches for words that have the same stem as the word you type, after removing common suffixes and prefixes used in English to indicate the grammatical role of a word.) If you want to search for an exact match to a word, ignoring variations, put the word in quotes. For example, if you want to find "operator" but not "operators," type:

   "operator"

The engine normally matches the words you type separately. That is, it matches any page that contains all of the words, even if the words don't appear together on the page or appear in a different order from what you typed. If you want to match an exact phrase, with the words appearing together on the page in exactly the order you specify, simply put the phrase in quotes:

   "grammar rule"

You can mix quoted phrases and keywords:

   operator "grammar rule"

This will match any page that contains the word "operator" (or variations, such as "operators") somewhere on the page, and which also contains the exact phrase "grammar rule" somewhere on the page.

Sometimes you want to search for pages that don't contain a particular word. This is useful when you're searching for a term that has several meanings, and you want to exclude pages related to the meanings you're not interested in. You can do this by putting the word NOT (in all capital letters) in front of the word you want to exclude:

   operator NOT arithmetic

This searches for pages that contain the word "operator" but not the word "arithmetic".