Help with Searching

Search Rules

The Tobacco Papers search engine helps you find documents from the Tobacco Papers archive. Here's how it works: you tell the search engine what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search engine responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

How To Use:

1. Type your keywords in the search box.
2. If you want the search engine to find the documents that contain all the words you have typed, select "All".
3. Alternatively, if you want the search engine to find the documents that contain at least one (but not necessarily all) of the words you have typed, select "Any".
4. Press the Search button to start the search.

Here's an Example Using "All":

1. Type price promotion in the search box and select "All".
2. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
3. The results page will return with a list of documents which contain both the words "price" and "promotion".

Here is an Example Using "Any":

1. Type price promotion in the search box and select "Any".
2. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.
3. The results page will return with a list made up of the documents containing the word "price" plus the documents containing the word "promotion".

More Basics - An Overview

What is a Word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search engine needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want from the Tobacco Papers archive. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

What is a Phrase?

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.

Example #1: Notice what happens when you enter "price promotions" into the keywords search box: this term returns fewer search results because you are now searching for the phrase "price promotions" rather than occurrences of both words "price" and "promotions".

You can also...

Example #2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999 9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Cigar" will match the lowercase "cigar" and uppercase "CIGAR".

By default, all searches are accent insensitive as well, but administrators can change this setting. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like õ.

Including or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find documents with "price" but without "promotions", try "+price-promotions".

Expand your search using wildcards (*):
By typing * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.

Example: Try promot* to find promotion, promotions, promoting, or promoted.

Searching for web addresses:

If your search term is a URL, like "http://www.yahoo.com/", some search engines will redirect you directly to the URL. To avoid this behaviour, and do an actual search with the URL as the search term, enclose the URL in double-quotes.

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