Search - MBC old Search - Archived

Search Help

To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more detailed your query, the more relevant your results.

Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

Translated: require HOUSE, require painting

Finds "HOUSE Painting", "HOUSE painting", and "painting of type HOUSE".
Does not find the lowercase "house painting", nor the abbreviated "HOUSE paint".

Translated: forbid HOUSE, require paints

Finds "Car paints", "Indoor paints", and lowercase "house paints".
Does not find "HOUSE colors" nor "HOUSE paints".

Translated: prefer HOUSE, require PAINTS

Finds "Perl scripts", "CGI scripts", and "CGI Scripts".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.

Translated: require the phrase "HOUSE paints"

Finds "HOUSE paints".
Does not find "HOUSE Paints" nor "paints of type HOUSE".

Translated: require house (case insensitive), require words starting with "paint"

Finds "HOUSE paints", "house painting", "House painter".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.

Translated: require Venus (case sensitive), require pictures, forbid planet, prefer images

First lists "pictures and images of Venus", then "Venus pictures".
Does not list lowercase "venus picture", nor forbidden "picture of planet Venus".

Translated: ignores common words like where, is, and the - requires words containing "frog"

Finds "frog", "frogleg", and "bullfrog".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *frog*?".

Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "usa" will match "Usa", "USA", and "usA", while the term "USA" matches only its uppercase version.

The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.