Boston University: Search Tips

Quick Tips & Examples

It's easy to search with Infoseek. Just type in a few words or phrases. Try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the documents you seek. The more words you give, the better results you'll get. Here are some examples:

Search by typing words and phrases.

87 Dodge Dynasty with power brakes for sale

Infoseek will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the words in your search -- Infoseek returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms.

Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate with commas.

"87 Dodge Dynasty" with "power brakes" "for sale"

A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma.

Use UPPER case to indicate exact match.

Dodge Dynasty

Infoseek automatically treats adjacent capitalized words as a single phrase. Search terms in lowercase will match words in any case, otherwise, an exact case match is used. For example, dodge will find matches for Dodge, dodge, and DoDgE, whereas a query for Dodge will only match Dodge.