At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your search to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started with the basic searching language.

• Words with the same prefix can be located using an asterisk. For example, in your search box type defer* to find defer, deferment, deferments, and so on.
  
• All forms of a word. For example, in the search box type write** to find write, writing, and wrote.
  
• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these searches, network and engineer and network near engineer, look for the words network and engineer on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.
  
• Exclude certain text from your search with the AND NOT keywords. For example, if you want to find all instances of employment but not opportunities, write the following search criteria:
  
  employment AND NOT opportunities

• To find all instances of either one word or another, add the OR keyword. For example:
  
  deferment OR forbearance
  
  This search finds all pages that mention deferment or forbearance or both.
  
• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want the search engine to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following search criteria:
  
  "loan near origination"
  
  The search engine will literally look for the complete phrase loan near origination. But if you type the same search criteria without the quotation marks:
  
  loan near origination
  
  The search engine searches all documents for the words loan, near, and origination.

We hope these hints will get you started. Search away! (click here to search)