Search help

Term Queries
Phrase Queries
Searching Specific Fields
Wildcards
Boolean queries
Range queries
Grouping
Proximity searches
Special characters
Other search resources

Term queries:

A term is just a simple word. To find pages containing the term coconut, use:

You can specify any number of terms, eg:

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Phrase queries:

To search for a phrase rather than a single word, enclose your phrase in double quotes. eg:

Note if you use the advanced search form you do not need to use the double quotes, just type your phrase into the phrase box.

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Searching specific fields:

You can specify which field to search by prefixing your query term with the field name followed by a colon. Searchable fields are title, date of last modification (last_modified) and page contents. Page contents is the default field to search, so if no field is specified this is the one that will be searched. To search for the word coconut in the title, use:

The last modified date is stored in the form of a four digit year, followed by two digits to represent the month of the year (01 - 12), and two digits to represent the day of the month.
To search for pages modified today, use:

See also advanced search form

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Wildcards:

? stands for any single character, eg coco? will match cocos and cocoa

* stands for any number of characters, eg coco* will match cocos, cocoa and coconut

A wildcard cannot be used as the first character of a term.

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Boolean operators:

The default operator is AND - that is if no other boolean operator is present in your query, the AND operator will be used to join your terms. Other boolean operators are OR, NOT, + and -

Find pages containing the terms coconut or coir:

Find pages containing the term coconut, but without the term coir:

Find pages containing the terms coconut and coir, coconut must be present

Find pages containing the term coconut, coir must not be present

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Range queries:

The range operator is TO. This can be used with the last_modified field to find all documents modified in the past week, eg:

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Grouping:

Query clauses can be grouped using brackets to form sub-queries.

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Proximity searches:

Proximity searches can be used to specify that your search terms should found within a specific distance from each other. The tilde ~ symbol is used for this. The following search will find pages in which the words coconut and cocos appear within 10 words of each other

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Special characters:

Special characters must be escaped with a \ character. The special characters are:
+ - & | ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \
So to search for pages about rope-making, you would use:

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Other search resources:

	A resource discovery engine giving access to multiple data sources via a single search. To find out what Kew knows about a given plant, start here.
	Find out about the Kew Library collections by searching our catalogue, and gain access to botany libraries worldwide, starting from here.