Advanced Search Tips
To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more detailed your query, the more relevant your results.
This search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for quickly and easily. For example:
Translated: Require MSP, Require Greenock- Finds "MSP for Greenock", "Greenock MSP", and "the MSP, who lives in Greenock".
Does not find the lowercase "msp for greenock."
Translated: Forbid MSP, Require Greenock- Finds "Greenock community" and "Greenock economy".
Does not find "Greenock MSP".
Translated: Prefer politicians, Require debating- Finds "Debating Chamber" and "politicians will be debating".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.
Translated: Require the phrase "Duncan McNeil MSP"- Finds "Duncan McNeil MSP".
Does not find "MSP, Duncan McNeil"
Translated: Require debate (case insensitive), Require words starting with "politic"- Finds "political debate", "in the Main Debate, politicians", "Politicing in the debate".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.
Translated: Forbid boring, Require McNeil (case sensitive), Require speeches, Prefer Parliamentary (case sensitive)- First lists "Parliamentary speeches of Duncan McNeil", then "speeches of Duncan McNeil".
Does not list lowercase "parliamentary speeches of duncan mcneil", nor the forbidden "boring Parliamentary speeches of Duncan McNeil".
Translated: Ignores common words like "where", "is", and "the", Requires words containing "dog"- Finds "dog", "hotdog", and "dogged".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *dog*?".
Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "msp" will match "Msp", "MSP", and "msP", while the term "MSP" 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.
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