The text field at the top right of every page allows you to search for documents in this site based on its text content. 

In some browsers, typing text in that field will provide immediate search results as you type, which works well to quickly zoom in on what you are looking for by typing multiple words. This is called "live search". If you hit the enter key, click the search button, or click on "show all..." in the live search window, then you will get a complete results of the search in the main window. You may note that the results in the main window are not always exactly the same as those returned by live search. This may be the case if you formulate a complex text query (see below), because the live search engine may not parse the query in exactly the same way. Also, note that for live search to work, a "globbing" '*" is implicitly added to the end of your search, which may also account for the difference (for example, if you type "horse", livesearch will return results that contain horse and horsepower, but the "regular" search will only return results that contain horse.

You can perform complex searches using that field alone (see Text search hints, below), however, if you want even more control on the search you can click on the Advanced Search link in the results page to get a set of fields you can search on. With that advanced form, you can restrict your search to the title or Description fields, elements of the Keyword field, content added since a certain time, contents of a certain type, certain authors, or the publication state (of course the search will return no result if you do not have the permission to see content in the state(s) you selected).

The search results are currently not sorted in any way.  This capability may be added in the future, including some measure of relevancy.

The  icon in the results page allows you to publish the result of any search on another site using the RSS interface. For example, you can make a RSS feed for the events added in the last week. Please use this feature responsibly (do not have you site update every second) or we may have to remove it.

Text search hints

Boolean expressions

Search for Boolean expressions like:

word1 AND word2

This will search for all objects that contain both "word1" and "word2". Valid Boolean operators include AND, OR, and NOT.  A sequence of words without operators implies AND.

Parentheses

Control search order with parenthetical expressions:

(word1 AND word2) OR word3

This will return objects containing "word1" and "word2" or just objects that contain the term "word3".

Globbing

The globbing characters are * for multiple characters and ? for a single character.

Z*

returns all words that begin with "Z".

Zop?

returns all words that begin with "Zop" and have one more character. Note though that you can use a * at the start of a word, but not a ?

Phrase search and combinations

Double-quoted text implies phrase search, for example:

"carpet python" OR frogs

will search for all occurences of the phrase "carpet python" or of the word "frogs"

All of these advanced features can be mixed together. For example:

((bob AND uncle) AND NOT Zoo*)\

will return all objects that contain the terms "bob" and "uncle" but will not include any objects that contain words that start with "Zoo" like "Zoologist", "Zoology", or "Zoo" itself.