Basics of Searching in Quicksearch

Use Quicksearch to search across the Catalog, Articles+, Digital Collections, and Archives at Yale.  You will probably get a very large set of results and land on the All Results page, also known as the Quicksearch Quilt.

The Quilt displays the following:

• Six formats (such as books, journal and magazine articles, and film and video), listed in the jump list, labeled "Jump to Section on This Page,"
• The jump list corresponds to six blocks of three records each.
• On the left is a more complete list of 15 formats.
• If a group of results or a particular format looks interesting, click on "View all results in XXX" link, on the name of the format, or the number of results, and you will see details of the set.
• You may also choose to see only Online results for your search by clicking on "Show Online Results Only."

Viewing the complete results from a Data Source.

Immediately below the search box, next to All Results, you will see the individual data sources that contribute records to Quicksearch: Catalog, Articles+, Digital Collections, and Archives or Manuscripts.

To browse only the results from the catalog for example, with no Articles+, Archives at Yale, or Digital Collections results, click on Catalog . Your search will now be repeated in the complete Yale Library and Law Library catalogs. Facets and other functionality will be available for you to further refine your search.

You can also click and re-execute your search in other data sources: Articles+, Databases, Digital Collections, Archives or Manuscripts, and New Arrivals.

Tips for the Basic search in Quicksearch:

Tip 1.  Quicksearch routinely provides "stemming" for common endings to words, that is, common present and past tenses for verbs are added or removed so that a search on the word 'work', for example, will retrieve records that contain the words 'work', 'works', 'working', and 'worked' but not 'worker' or 'workers' (although a search of 'worker' retrieves records with the words 'worker' and 'workers').  Stemming is not performed for proper nouns.

Tip 2.  Quicksearch will return records that have all the words for up to 6 terms or quoted phrases 

• If there are 6 words or quoted phrases, all are required.
• If there are more than 6 words or quoted phrases, 80% must be in the record. 
• This change in searching was implemented in October 2025.

You can further control your results by using the following special search syntax:

• Use a '+' immediately preceding the term (or quoted phrase) to instruct the system to return only records that include the term(s).
• Use a '-' immediately preceding the term (or quoted phrase) to instruct the system to exclude all records that include the term(s).
• Use quotation marks around a phrase to search only that exact phrase as typed.  For example, "united nations" +law will return many fewer and more relevant results about the United Nations and law than will a search without quotation marks and the '+' sign.
• Stop words (the, a, and, or, etc.) are removed from a search unless they are included in a phrase in quotation marks.