The following are search strategies to help improve the results of your search for grant opportunities.

•  There are a number of ways to search and browse on Grants.gov. Use Basic and Advanced Search when you are looking for something specific. When you want to explore the different types of grants or you are not sure exactly what type of grant opportunity that you are looking for, browse by Category or Agency.

Basic Search: Allows you to search by Funding Opportunity Number or CFDA Number and complete a Keyword search.

Browse by Category: Do you want to learn about Federal grant opportunities available today? Start by selecting a grant category that interests you.

Browse by Agency: Access a list of grant opportunities by Agency by clicking on a Federal Agency.

Advanced Search : If you still have not found what you are looking for by completing the basic search or browsing, use the advanced search. This allows you to search by Date, Funding Activity Category, Funding Instrument Type, Agency in addition to searching by Funding Opportunity Number or CFDA Number or completing a Keyword search.

•  Select multiple items when searching by Funding Activity Category, Funding Instrument Type, Agency, and Office.

If you want to select multiple items, it may be necessary on some browsers to hold down the CONTROL or SHIFT key to select multiple items. If you are a MAC user, use the APPLE key to mark multiple items.

•  Expand your search by Keyword, Funding Opportunity or CFDA Number with a wildcard.

The following two wildcards can be used to expand your search:

•  Asterisks can be used to replace one or more characters at the end of the term. This is useful for finding pages with words that have multiple endings. For example, if you typed "National*" in to the search field, the results would contain links to all grant opportunities with phrases that include the word National, such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration or National Endowment for the Humanities.

•  Question marks provide more search flexibility and can be used to replace any single character with the exception of the first character of a word. For example, if you typed "bl?ck" in to the search field, the results might contain phrases that contain "block" or "black", such as "Black Lung Clinics Program" or "Building Blocks Research for Advanced Concepts for High Temperature Tribology".

•  Narrow your search by using Boolean operators to include and exclude words when searching by Keyword.

To help limit your results to specific information you can include Boolean operators, or special modifiers, that require certain words be included or excluded. Boolean operators that are words, such as OR, AND, and NOT, have to be upper case letters and require a space between search words. For example, "Housing AND Farming" will generate search results, but "HousingANDFarming" will not generate search results. The following are Boolean operators that can be used to complete a Keyword search:

•  OR (Space is also considered as OR). If you type "Housing Farming" or "Housing OR Farming", the results would contain a match if Housing or Farming appears in the grant opportunity listing.

•  AND (+ is also considered as AND). If you type "Housing+Farming" or "Housing AND Farming", the results would contain a match if Housing and Farming appears in the grant opportunity listing.

•  NOT (- is also considered as NOT). If you type "Housing-Farming" or "Housing NOT Farming", the results would contain a match if Housing appears in the document and Farming does not appear in the grant opportunity listing.