---
title: "Searching Hints"
sidenav: about
---

= Searching Hints

== If you got lots of irrelevant results...

. If you search for several words such as "quantum  hard drives", an OR is implied meaning that to be counted as relevant, only one of the words has to appear in a message. To find only messages with all three words, change the search to "quantum and hard and drives"
. If you still get lots of irrelevant messages, see if they have something in common. If so, you can exclude them with the *not* operator. For example "quantum and hard and drives not ide" will exclude any messages about ide quantum hard drives.

== If you do not think you received everything you should have...

. If one of your keywords has variant forms, be sure to enter all relevant forms. If you are searching for "buslogic", you might change it to "buslogic or bustek".
. Words with varying suffixes can be wildcarded. Searching for "drive*" will pick up words such as drive, drives, driver, drivers and so on.
. Try discarding words that could be implied by the context of the message. For example "quantum and hard and drive" might miss some relevant messages that "quantum and drive" would get.

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link:../[Return to the search page]
