The XODP Web Guides are designed to be searched by keyword using the XODP Search Engine™, which you will find prominently displayed on the XODP Home Page. The search engine is set up with "Find ANY" as the default, so just enter the keywords that you want to search for into the search box and click the "Search" button. The ranked results will come from a total match on the words and phrases which you supply, so try to think of several specific terms for your topic and spell them correctly. Capitalization doesn't matter, but it may help to include important plurals and derived words in your search query.

The XODP Web Guides target popular search terms, so you will almost certainly find an exact match to a general search query if one is available. Moreover, as the database of XODP Web Guides grows, the number of XODP search queries with "results not found" will continue to shrink. Even so, according to a two year study conducted by Alexa Research, the vast majority of queries entered into most search engines are totally unique queries. More than 9.1 million unique terms were searched for during the period of the study, which determined that the top 50 search terms entered into the top 10 search engines account for only 2.73 percent of all search term page views.

Needless to say, it would be a daunting task to compile XODP Web Guides for such a wide diversity of queries, but the XODP Web Guides are not meant to be a replacement for the major search engines most knowledgeable end users know and love. Rather, by targeting popular search terms, the XODP Web Guides should reduce the noise currently found in the search results returned by most search engines.

The search options narrated in this section comprise the entire list of alternative search options currently available for the XODP Search Engine.

• All Words
  
  

  Type more than one word and select [ Find ALL ] to find all of the words, or you can use Boolean expressions and operators. (See below.)

• Exact Phrase: "..."

  You can search for exact phrases by surrounding them in double quotes. Or you can just type the words and select [ Find EXACT phrase ]. Punctuation must be the same to be found between words, for example "Smith, John."

• Boolean Operators: + -
  
  

  Use + in front of each word or a quoted phrase that you require.
  Use - in front of each word that you want to exclude.

• Boolean Expressions: AND OR NOT ( )

  Use AND, OR, NOT, and ( ) to form a Boolean expression. AND requires, OR allows, NOT excludes.
  Use double quotes to protect the words "and", "or", or "not" in a phrase.

  Examples:

  Query	Gets the documents with
  stock market	'stock' or 'market' or both
  "stock market"	the phrase 'stock market'
  +stock +market	'stock' and 'market'
  +stock -market	'stock' but not 'market'
  +president -"United States"	'president' but not 'United States'
  (stock OR market) AND NOT president	'stock' or 'market', and without 'president'

Search WWW Search xodp.org

The XODP Web Guides were designed to work in conjunction with other search engines rather than to be featured in a stand-alone Web site. As such, plans are in the works to augment the search results returned by the XODP Search Engine with search results from other major search engines so that end users can use XODP as a comprehensive search solution. In the meantime, XODP recommends Google as the most comprehensive search solution currently available on the World Wide Web.