" " ... use quotes to search for a phrase;

e.g. "i have a dream"

+ ... requires the word or phrase to be in the document;

e.g. lincoln gettysburg will return documents containing either or both words, while +lincoln +gettysburg retrieves only documents containing both words

- ... eliminates documents with this word/phrase;

e.g. shark* -"san jose" will retrieve shark or sharks but not san jose

* ... is used for truncation of up to 5 letters within and at the end of search terms;

e.g. colo*r retrieves color and colour; colo*r* retrieves color, colours, colorado, etc.

...case sensitive only when you include uppercase in your search terms:

e.g. usa retrieves usa and USA, but USA retrieves only USA

...allows restricting searches to fields such as image, link, title, or url;

e.g. image: halebopp retrieves documents which have halebopp in an image tag

e.g. link:albion.edu retrieves documents which have albion.edu in a hypertext link in the document

...the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, NEAR can be used in Advanced mode;

+ ... requires the word or phrase to be in the document;

e.g. lincoln gettysburg will return documents containing either or both words, while +lincoln +gettysburg retrieves only documents containing both words

- ... eliminates documents with this word/phrase;

e.g. shark -"shark bay" will retrieve shark but not shark bay

...the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, NEAR can be used, but the must be all upper case

e.g. shark OR elasmobranch will retrieve documents with either or both terms

...when using Boolean operators, parentheses can be used to group like terms

e.g. (shark OR elasmobranch) AND "big pine key"

...search terms can be repeated to emphasize importance

...Excite does not allow truncation although it will automatically search for synonyms and related terms

...use capitals for names.

e.g. John Wenzel