The advanced search form is designed to help you easily perform very specific searches, without needing to know how Boolean and other types of searches work.
Here is how the form looks:



It is easy to understand what the show * results per page line is about. But how about the first part, with those three groups of fields?


Each field group contains three fields:

A long text field at the bottom of each field section, where you enter the words to search for (or exclude, as we'll see in a moment):

We will refer to this field as the search terms field.

A field to the upper right of the search terms field, indicating whether the contents of the search terms field will be treated as separate words or as an exact phrase:

We will refer to this field as the match type field.

A field to the upper left of the search terms field, with these selections available:

Selecting must contain in this field means that no documents will be returned from the search that do not contain the contents of the search terms field. ("Contents" of the field means each word if "the words" is selected in the match type field; otherwise it means the exact phrase in the search terms field, minus any extraneous characters.)
Selecting should contain gives preference to the documents containing the contents of the search terms field, but does not require them to be present in a returned document.
Selecting must not contain means that no documents containing the contents of the search terms field will be returned, even if those documents match words from another section of the search form.


Broadening your search:

Within the search terms field, using an asterisk (*) as a suffix broadens your search.
For example, to find words that start with gold, selecting must contain in the match type field and entering gold* in the search terms field returns documents containing the word gold, goldfinch, goldfinger, and golden, among others.

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