Introduction

This document describes how to use our advanced search page.  If you are looking for help with the basic search, please see our basic search help.

Whereas our basic search uses a drop-down box to govern the logic applied to your query, the advanced search lets users add special logical operators to their queries.  With this approach, you can build highly expressive, structured queries.  

Top-Level Takeaways

• Searchers can use the following operators in queries:
  • No operator: Boolean OR, this term is optional
  • AND (aka +): the following term is required
  • NOT (aka -): the following term must not appear
  • Quotation marks (" "): the enclosed terms must appear exactly as written
• Search operators (AND, and NOT) must be written in ALL CAPS (or as + or -, respectively)
• Click on the orange boxes (facets) to filter results by document type

Using Search Operators in Queries

Operators are keywords and punctuation that allow you to add structure to your query.

Boolean AND and OR

By default, our search engine combines terms with a Boolean OR.  For instance the query Truman Doctrine will return documents that contain A) both terms, Truman and Doctrine (anywhere in the document), B) just the term Truman, and C) just the term Doctrine.  

Users can change this behavior by using the AND operator.  Continuing our example, Truman AND Doctrine (or Truman +Doctrine), returns only class A from above: documents that contain both terms.

Quoted Phrases

Wrapping search terms in quotation marks tells the search engine to mark a document as a hit against this term only if it contains that exact phrase. (N.B. throughout our search tools, capitalization does not matter.)  

For example, consider the query Truman Doctrine. As of this writing, a default search of that query retrieves 1,240 documents, many of which seem non-relevant (e.g. the second and third hits are about the Obama Doctrine and the Bush doctrine, respectively). To improve these results, we might search: "Truman Doctrine," which returns only 21 documents, all of which appear to be relevant.

Term Negation (Boolean NOT)

Some searches benefit from using term negation (the NOT operator). Preceding a term with NOT tells the search engine to exclude any hits that contain this feature. This is useful when a class of non-relevant documents is flooding your search results. 

For example, imagine we are interested in materials about Oklahoma City as a civic and political entity.  A search for "Oklahoma City" will be dominated by material related to the 1995 Murrah Building bombing. If this attack is not relevant, we could alter our search to read: "Oklahoma City" NOT bombing.

One important thing to note:  logical operators, AND and NOT must be written in all caps.

Advanced Use of Query Operators

So far, we have used query operators in straightforward ways, which is usually all we need in order to get good search results. However, it is possible to combine operators more creatively.

For instance, in our Oklahoma City example, we could negate more aggressively by writing our query like so: "Oklahoma City" NOT (bombing  McVeigh  attack). In English, this query tells the search engine to return documents that meet the criteria: contains the exact phrase Oklahoma City but which does not contain any of the terms bombing, McVeigh or attack.

In general, you can precede any term or group of terms with the logical operators AND and OR. For example, consider the query:

   (Bush Obama Trump) AND NAFTA NOT Clinton

This would return pages that mention both NAFTA and either Bush, Obama, or Trump (or a subset of them) but which do not mention Clinton. 

The combination of parentheses to group terms, quotation marks to join terms into a unit, and logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) to govern how each term unit is treated allows us to make queries of varying complexity and expressiveness.

Filtering Results with Facets

At the top of each result page, the search engine includes a group of "facets"—orange boxes labeled:

• Miller Center Scholars
• Oral History Interviews
• Presidential Biographies
• Presidential Recordings
• Presidential Speeches
• Public Events

Clicking on one of these boxes will filter your search results to include only that class. For instance, if you searched using our example query (Bush OR Obama OR Trump) AND NAFTA NOT Clinton, you could click on the "Public Events" facet to limit results only to pages describing Miller Center events on post-Clinton NAFTA issues.