Advanced Search
If you are not happy with the results of your search, you may refine your search by using the additional search functions provided at the top of your results page. The following instructions will help you understand the various features of the advanced search functions pictured below.

Word Match
By default, our search feature lists every page that contains any one of the words you entered in your search. If you type academic calendar you will get every page containing the word academic whether or not the word calendar is found there as well. In this case, you may wish to limit the number of "hits" (search returns) to only those pages that contain all the words in the search. Simply click on the down arrow next to "Match: Any" and choose "All" as is illustrated below. The "Any" match setting is better if you want the widest selection of hits possible. For example, if you are searching for Labor and Employment Law any page that contains either the word labor or employment may be helpful to you.

Importance of Words
Good Web searching, like any research, requires that you gauge the importance of the words you use. Decide which words are most important and put them first. Eliminate words that appear on almost every page of the site, like "Law" or "Brooklyn". Also avoid extraneous words, such as articles ("the", "a", "an"), prepositions ("in", "from", "by") or conjunctions ("and", "or"), unless you are searching for a specific publication or article title that contains these words (e.g. Language in the Legal Process). Deciding whether your search results should match “Any” or “All” of the words in your search, as in the example above, will also make your search more successful.

Other Options
If you are familiar with Boolean search commands (i.e. plus and minus symbols or quotation marks) you may select Boolean from the Match pull-down menu.

You may also specify how your search results are listed. If you would like to see only the page titles without a brief excerpts from the page, you can change the "Format" from "Long" to "Short". (This is not recommened.)

Using the "Sort by" pull-down menu, you may also wish to change the order of the listings by "Score" (how closely the page matches your search), "Time" (when the page was last updated) or page "Title". You may also reverse these listings. Feel free to experiment with the search feature until you become comfortable with the search function.