Our search engine follows the query string logic convention established by AltaVista.
Each search term may be preceded by the standard logic operators not, and, or or. If you search for "dogs not hot", you'll find all documents containing the word "dogs" except those documents which also contain the word "hot". If you type in "and hot and dogs and beer", you'll find only those documents which contain all three search terms. (The standard shorthand notation works too. A search on "dogs -hot" is equivalent to the first example, and "+hot +dogs +beer" will return the same documents as the second.)
The default logic operator is or. Thus, a search for "hot dogs beer" would return pages with at least one of the three terms. IOW, adding more terms (without preceeding them with a "+" or "and") makes your search less selective (produces more results).
If a search term has at least one capital letter, like "Diesel", the search will be case sensitive with respect to that word -- that is, only documents containing "Diesel" will be found. On the other hand, the lowercase search term "diesel" will result in matches with documents containing "diesel", "Diesel", "DIESEL", or "DIEsel".
To search for a specific phrase, use quotes. For example, the query ""table tennis"" (purple quotes included) would not generate a hit from a document containing "The pool table is beyond the tennis courts.". (Without quotes, the sentence would match the query.) Boolean operators can also act on quotations: a search on "+army +intelligence not "army intelligence"" would return only those documents where "army" and "intelligence" appear separately.
Our search engine matches words, not strings. A search for "is" would turn up only that word, not "island", "this", or "mist". To perform a string search, preface your term with the dollar sign: A query on "$is" would find all 4 words.
Note: Advanced wildcard searches using the asterisk (*) are not supported: Including an asterisk anywhere within your query will return a list of all the searchable (ie, the less dynamic) pages.