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Help:Searching
Redirected from Lostpedia:Searching
From the Web
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- A basic search is performed by entering the relevant term(s) in the search box.
- This is at the left side of the screen.
- Clicking Go (or Enter on the keyboard) will automatically take you to the article, if it exists.
- Clicking Search will return a list of articles that match the terms you enter.
On Lostpedia
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- A basic search is performed by entering the relevant term(s) in the search box.
- This is at the top right of the screen.
- Clicking Go (or Enter on the keyboard) will automatically take you to the article, if it exists.
- Clicking Search will return a list of articles that match the terms you enter.
Effective searching
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Some hints that will help you use the Lostpedia search feature effectively:
Limiting results
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Lostpedia's default search will return articles with any of the words in your query.
- For example, doctor sawyer returns results containing doctor but not sawyer, and also sawyer but not doctor - in addition to the results that you probably wanted; those which contained both words.
- To only return results including both words, add a + to the start of each word: +sawyer +doctor returns only pages containing both terms.
- To be even more specific, you can enclose the terms within quotes: "doctor sawyer" turns up a smaller set of results, which not only have both words but have them in order (Sawyer is thankfully not a doctor).
- To exclude terms, add a - before them; -doctor sawyer returns results containing sawyer, but not doctor.
- Performing a Boolean search is also possible; "AND", "OR", and "NOT" are the permitted Boolean terms.
Avoid short or common words
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- Obviously, searching solely for the or and is going to return a lot of results.
- Avoiding connectives is a good rule of thumb; jack in the swan is far more confusing to the search engine than jack swan.
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