General
To search, type your query words into the search field and then either press return or click the "search"-button. The more information you enter, the better the search results. For example, you can copy whole passages of sample documents and paste them into the search field.

Complete and partial hits
Documents containing complete matches for all the search terms are given priority. Results appear at the top of the results list. These documents are denoted as complete hits because they fulfill all requested query criteria. Documents that do not contain all of the query words are denoted as partial hits.

Capitalization and accented characters
Managed Custom Search automatically normalizes capitalization and accented characters such as umlauts. Search terms which differ only with regard to capitalization and/or accented characters (such as 'Heidelberg', 'heidelberg' and 'HEIDELBERG' or 'Köln' and 'Koeln') are considered equivalent and return identical results.

Stop words
Relevancy eliminates stop words automatically. Stop words are non-content words that occur very frequently and, as such, do not contribute to a good search result. Examples of stop words are  "and", "or", "the".
Excluding search terms (the minus operator)

By setting up a search term with a minus sign (-), only those documents which do not contain that search term are retrieved. The minus operator can be applied to more than one search term but never to every search term in a query. The minus operator can only be applied with other search terms to ensure that at least one document is retrieved (e.g. 'german -industry').

Required search terms (the plus operator)
By setting up a search term with a plus sign (+), only those documents that contain this term are retrieved. Please note that the plus sign must immediately precede the search term, for example: '+german industry'.

Phrase search (sequence operator)
A phrase can be denoted by grouping words using quotation marks (" "). This limits the search to the documents that contain the phrase exactly submitted. Note that stop words inside phrases as well as different inflections are not eliminated.

Prefix search (wildcard operator)
A search with the wildcard operator (asterisk, *) at the end of the entered characters returns documents containing words that begin with the entered characters. Thus the asterisk is a placeholder for zero or more characters. Please note that the wildcard operator only works with at least two characters in front of the asterisk (*). Example: 'book*' will find documents that contain 'book', 'books', 'booking' , 'bookshop' etc.

Combination of operators
The operators of a query can be combined. Please note, that for each query term only one operator is allowed.

Valid examples:
term1 -term2 "term3 term4 term5"
term1 +term2 "term3 term4" "term5 term6"

Invalid example:
"term1 -term2"

Searching inside the set of matching documents
In order to continue your search inside the set of matching documents, simply add more search terms to your query.