Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on "dogs -pizzas" is equivalent to the first example, and "+hot +dog +pizzas" will return the same documents as the second.
If a search term has at least one capital letter, like "parIS", the search will be case sensitive with respect to that word - that is, only documents containing "parIS" will be found. On the other hand, lowercase words like "paris" will generate hits from "Paris", "PARIS", or "parIS".
To group a collection of words, use quotes. For example, the query "Zoltan Milosevic" (quotes included) would not generate a hit from "Slobodan Milosevic met with Zoltan Smith". Without quotes, the sentence would count. Boolean operators can also act on quotations: a search on '+the +kitten not "the kitten"' would return only those documents where "the" and "kitten" appear separately.
This search finds words, not strings. A search for "in" would turn up only that word, not "bin", "inside", or "acquaintance". To perform a string search, preface your term with the dollar sign - a query on "$in" would find all words lists above. Note that more complex wildcard searches using the asterisk are not permitted. Including the asterisk in your query will return a list of all files, but that's its only function.
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