Quicksearch Expert Search Tips

How Quicksearch handles search terms depends on the number of terms (clauses) being searched.

• If there are 1-2 clauses, all are required
• If there are 3-5 clauses, all but one are required 
• If there are 6 clauses, all but two are required
• If there are more than 6 clauses, 90% are required

When a search uses three or more clauses, therefore, some of the results will contain most but not all of the clauses entered.

The user may exert more control over this behavior by using specialized search syntax.

• Putting a ‘+’ directly before a clause (no space) requires it to be present in every result
• Putting a ‘-‘ directly before a clause excludes the results that contain it
• A phrase in quotation marks is searched as a unit and considered a single clause (for example, searching for “united nations” law returns many fewer results than a search on united nations law, as it requires both the phrase “united nations” and the word “law” to be present, while searching without the quotation marks requires only two of the three terms to appear somewhere in the record; to require all three terms to be present in all results without specifying that “united nations” must appear as a phrase, use +united +nations +law)
• ‘+’ and ‘-‘ operate the same directly before a phrase in quotation marks as they do before a single word
• Stop words (the, a, and, or, etc.) are removed from the search terms before calculating the number of clauses, unless they are part of a phrase in quotation marks