Logo Special Inspector General Iraq Reconstruction Special Inspector General Iraq Reconstruction
  About SIGIR     Hotline     SIGIR Reports     Initiatives     News Room  
Search Tips:     
   Search
  Search  
 
Quick Tips
  • Enter your search terms in lower case with a space between the terms.
    • common operating

  • Capitalize proper nouns to search for specific people, places, or products.
    • Department of Defense

  • Enclose a phrase in double quotes to search for that exact phrase.
    • "common operating environment"

  • Narrow your searches by using an OR if any of the search terms can appear on a page.
    • common OR operating OR environment

  • Narrow your searches by using an AND if both search terms must appear on a page.
    • common AND operating

  • Exclude pages by using a NOT if a search term must not appear on a page.
    • common NOT government

  • Combine these techniques to create a specific search query. The better your description of the information you want, the more relevant your results will be.
    • government AND "common operating environment" NOT y2k
What Is a Search?
A search is the organized pursuit of information. Somewhere in a collection of documents, email messages, Web pages, and other sources, there is information that you want to find, but you have no idea where it is. The search engine gives you the means of finding that information.

You conduct a search by issuing a query, which is simply a way of asking a question that will find the information you are looking for. Searching is often an iterative operating. You submit a query and if the results list does not contain the information you are looking for, you modify the query until you locate a page that contains the answer.

Tools for Searching
The search engine provides the following tools to help you find what you are looking for:
  • A search form to enter your query
  • Ways to broaden or narrow the extent of your search
  • A results list of pages that match your query
The search engine produces a ranked list where the documents at the top of the list are more likely to be relevant than the documents toward the bottom.

The relevance of a document is based on how many of the search terms are present in the document, how frequently the search terms occur, and how close the search terms are to each other. 

 
FOIA  |  Terms of Use  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us