Search tips!
We've got a few tips below to help in your searching:
Use operators
| Operator | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| * | The asterisk serves as a wildcard operator. Unlike the other operators, it gets added to the end of the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator. |
paint*This will return results that contain the word paint as well as paints, painted, painting and painterly etc. |
| + | A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned. | +oil paintingThis will return results which contain the word oil but rank other results higher if they also contain painting. |
| - | A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned. | +oil -paintingThis will return results that contain the word oil but not painting. |
| " " | A phrase that is enclosed within double quotes only produces results that contain the whole phrase literally, as it was typed. | "School of Art"This will return results that contain the exact phrase School of Art. |
| no operator | Entering your search terms with no operator other than whitespace. | oil paintingThis will return results with at least one of the two words. |
A top tip for getting the best results is to combine operators.
Avoid stopwords
To further improve your search results try to avoid stopwords. Stopwords are commonly-used words (like also, and, away and here) or inappropriate words (like beforehand, concerning, everything and meanwhile). View a full list of stopwords.
In relation to using operators, if a stopword is specified with the truncation operator *, it will not be stripped from your search results.
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