Two Search Engines

This website has two different search engines. The one on this page for products, articles, news releases, and similar site content, and a separate search engine to help you find discussion threads in the discussion forums. To search for a topic or keyword in the discussions, go to any discussion page and click on "Search" near the top of the page. If discussion searching is what you want to do click here.

Search Rules for this "site content" search engine

The search engine on this page helps you find documents on this website and related sites. Here's how it works: You tell the search service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases or questions in the “Search” box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

How to Use:

1. Type your keywords in the “Search” box.
2. Press the “Search” button to start your search.

Here's an example:

1. Type liturgy triduum music in the “Search” box.
2. Press the “Search” button or press the “Enter” key.
3. The “Results” page will show you numerous pages on the Web about liturgies and liturgical music for the Triduum.

Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the “result” pages.

More Basics — An Overview

Here's a quick overview of the rest of our “basic help” page. Just click on the links to jump to these sections.

What is an 'Index'?
What is a Word?
What is a Phrase?
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Fancy Features for Typical Searches

What is an Index?

Webster's Dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of web pages and discussion group pages from around the world. The index becomes larger every day as people send us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have technology that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When you use our search service, you search the entire collection using keywords or phrases.

What is a Word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

What is a Phrase?

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your “result” pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use double quotation marks around the phrase when you enter words in the “Search” box.

Example 1: To find lyrics by the King, type "you ain't nothing but a hound dog" in the “search” box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes or dots.

Example 2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999 9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

All searches are case- and accent-insensitive. Searching for "Fur" will match the lowercase "fur", uppercase "FUR" and German "für".

Including or excluding words

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the “search” box.

Example: To find recipes for cookies with oatmeal but without raisins, try typing: recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin.

Expand your search using wildcards (*)

By typing an * at the end of a keyword, you can search for the word with multiple endings.

Example: Try typing: wish* to find wish, wishes, wishful, wishbone, and wishy-washy.

Fancy Features for Typical Searches

You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on the Net: