The Brookings.edu site search, powered by Google, uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. When you perform a search, the search function analyzes each page of the Brookings web site, as well as the pages that link to it, to determine the value of the page in relation to your search terms. The search function also gives more weight to pages in which your keywords are near each other.
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Automatic "and" Queries
By default, your search will only return pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between keywords. For example, to find items that contain both the terms "Unemployment" and "Health Care," simply search for "unemployment health care."
"OR" Searches
To search for pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase "OR" between terms. For example, to find items that contain either the term "education" or the term "schools," search for "education OR schools"
Capitalization
Searches on the Brookings site are not case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you enter them, are understood as lowercase. For example, searches for "george bush," "George Bush" and "George bush" all return the same results.
Stop Words
The Brookings.edu site search ignores common words and characters known as stop words. These include most pronouns, articles, single digits and single letters. These terms rarely help to narrow a search and can significantly slow searching.
To include stop words in your search, put a plus sign (+) immediately in front of the stop word or enclose your phrase in quotation marks. Make sure you include a space before the plus sign. For example, to find items that contain "Annual Report Version 1," search for "Annual Report Version +1."
Excluding Words
To exclude a word from your search, put a minus sign (-) immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign. For example, to find items that include the term "Middle East" but not the term "Israel," search for "Middle East -Israel."
Stemming
To provide the most accurate results, the Brookings.edu site search does not use stemming or support wildcard searches. Rather, it searches for exactly the words that you enter into the search box. For example, searching for "airlin" or "airlin*" will not yield "airline" or "airlines." If you're not sure which term will give you the best results, try doing a separate search for each.
Phrase Searches
To search for a complete phrase, add quotation marks ("") around the phrase. For example, to find items that include the phrase "Bringing Iran to the bargaining table," search for "Bringing Iran to the bargaining table" (quotation marks included). Phrase searches are useful when searching for event names, article titles and proper names.
Spelling
When the spell checker component of the search function detects a possible spelling mistake in your search terms it will return a single spelling suggestion above your search results. Simply click on the suggested term to view search results for that term. (Currently, the spell checker supports only U.S. English.)
Recommended Links
Some searches will return up to three recommended links above the full list of search results. These links are presented based on your search terms.
See Your Search Terms in the Results
Each search result includes one or more excerpts from the web page to show how your search terms are used in context on that page. Your search terms are displayed in bold text in the excerpt so that you can quickly determine if that page is relevant to your needs.
Sorting by Date
By default, search results are listed by relevance. Click the "Date" tab at the top of the results list to reorder the results by date, with the most recent items first. Items that do not contain dates are displayed at the end, sorted by relevance.
Since the Brookings.edu site search only returns results that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered.
You can further refine your search by topic, research program, expert, content type and date range using the options provided in the "Refine Search" area.