Search Page

Entering keywords

Enter one or more keywords describing the topic you are interested in. Separate your keywords by a blank space to retrieve documents containing all of them.

- The system is not sensitive: to the case (lower/upper case), to the usage of (singular or plural), to the gender (masculine or feminine), or to the use of puncutation for acronyms (UN will return the same documents as U.N.).

Search Suggestions

Once you have entered your query, you can use the suggestions listed on the right hand side of the results page (in the « Refine your search » box) to either narrow or broaden your query.

Narrowing your query to a subsection of the site

To restrict your query to a specific subsection of the website, use the scroll down menu beneath the search box, and make your selection from the choices available. The search is by default performed on the entire site.

Boolean Search

Use the following boolean operators to define multiple search terms:

AND: space, plus sign (+), AND.

To retrieve documents matching all of your keywords, you can either leave a space between your search terms, or use the "+" sign (right after each term and then leave a space between the keywords), or type AND (in capital letters) between each word.
e.g.: The query Himalaya mountain will retrieve documents containing both Himalaya AND mountain.

OR: OR.

Enter several words separated by OR (in uppercase letters and with a space between the operator and the words) to retrieve documents containing at least one of the search terms.
e.g.: The query soccer OR football will retrieve documents containing either soccer OR football or both.

NOT: minus sign (-), NOT, AND NOT.

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a "-" sign immediately in front of the word you do not want. You can also enter the boolean operator NOT or AND NOT with a blank space in front of the word you want to leave out.
e.g.: The query apple -computer will retrieve documents containing apple BUT NOT computer.

Phrase Searching: quote marks (" ")..

To search for a specific set of words, and return documents in which they appear together and exactly in the order you typed them in, use quote marks (" ").
e.g.: The query "electronic interchange" will only retrieve documents containing the exact expression "electronic interchange" and not "electronic data interchange".

Viewing your results:

- You can chose to sort your results either by date or by relevance (simply click on the view preference).
- You can chose to view or to hide the extracts (click on the matching preference).

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