BYU Studies
Alphabetical by Title

Explanation of Terms, Operators, Queries, and Grouping

• Capitalization of alphabetic characters is ignored. "MormoN" matches "mormon", "Mormon", "MORMON", etc.
• Common words and words with only 1 or 2 characters are ignored.
• All punctuation marks other than the following operators are ignored.
• Phrases enclosed within double quotes (") only matches exactly the same words in the same order. Nonword characters are ignored. "test phrase" matches "test, phrase" but not "phrase test", or "test or phrase".
• Parentheses may be used to group words and operators into subexpressions.
• A plus (+) in front of a word means it must be present.
• A minus (-) in front of a word means it must not be present. There must be at least one other search term in the same field.
• A space in front of a word means the word is optional, but it should be present.
• A tilde (~) in front of a word means it should not be present.
• > or < in front of a word increases (>) or decreases (<) the word's relevance.
• An asterisk (*) at the end of a word serves as a wildcard operator. "apple*" matches “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, “applet”, etc.
• @<distance> tests whether two or more words all start within the specified distance, measured in words. Specify the search words within a double-quoted string immediately before the @<distance> operator. For example, "jakarta apache"@10 looks for "apache" and "jakarta" within 10 words of each other.