The Tax Guide's regular search function looks for an exact match for the phrase that you enter.

Example: A search for the phrase business expense will return only those documents that have the exact phrase business expense in the text. If both business and expenses appear in the document, but not together in the correct order, no documents will be considered a match.

ADVANCED SEARCHING

Here's how to better focus your search, using specific search terms and constructs, so that the relevant documents are retrieved.

BOOLEAN SEARCH CONNECTORS

AND - To search for a document that must contain two or more terms, without regard to the order in which they appear, use the and connector.

Example: Searching for business and expense will retrieve all documents containing both search terms, even if they don't occur together and regardless of where they appear in the document.

OR - To find a document that contains at least one search term, but not necessarily all search terms, use the or connector.

Example: A search for automobile or expense will retrieve all documents that contain either automobile or expense, as well as all documents that contain both terms.

NEAR - You can use the near connector instead of the and connector to focus on documents that contain multiple search terms that occur close together. The search results that are returned are ranked so that the documents in which the words appear closest together are listed first.

Example: A search for business near expense will retrieve all documents containing both search terms. If the phrase business expense appears in a document, that document will be ranked higher than a document in which both words occur, but not as close together.

AND NOT - The and not connector allows you to specify words that must not appear in the document. This is useful when a term may occur in a variety of contexts.

Example: Search for taxes and not sales to retrieve documents dealing with taxes other than sales taxes.

USING QUOTATION MARKS AND WILDCARDS

QUOTATION MARKS - If you want to search for a term that includes one of the preceding connectors, enclose the entire expression in quotation marks ("").

Example: To search for wage and hour, "wage and hour" would be the search term. This will retrieve only those documents in which the exact phrase wage and hour appear.

Use quotation marks when searching for a term containing characters such as &, ^, #, @, or $.

Example: loan and "S&L"

If you want to search for an exact phrase that contains a symbol, place quotation marks around the entire phrase.

Example: "$1,000,000 Question"

WILD CARD - If you are looking for words that begin with the same characters, you can use the asterisk (*) as a wild card.

Example: A search for the term bank* will retrieve documents containing bank, banking, banks, and bankers.

ALL WORD FORMS - You can use two asterisks (**) to search for all forms of a word.

Example: Searching for drink** will retrieve documents containing the words drink, drinking, drank, and drunk.