Search Tips for the RAND Website

Quick Tips and Examples

For a simple search, just type in a few words or phrases in the box above and hit the "Search RAND" button. A query can be a single word, a string of words separated by spaces, or it can use more advanced syntax (see below). Try to use words that are likely to be unique to the subject in question. Examples:

Search by typing words and phrases

Diabetes and childhood obesity

Like all web search engines, Vivisimo finds documents containing all of the words in your query and presents them in order of relevance. However, it also creates categorized clusters on-the-fly, customized for your search results and displayed in the left column. Browsing these clusters can help you quickly zoom in on groups of relevant documents.

Note that the word "and" in the sample above is too common to be relevant, and so it's left out of the search results.

Identify phrases with quotation marks

Diabetes and "childhood obesity"

Quotes label exact phrases; the above search would find only pages about childhood obesity, not children in general.

Advanced Syntax

You can access more complex search behavior by combining words and phrases with the search command words below.

AND operator

Diabetes AND childhood AND obesity

Finds documents containing all of the specified words or phrases. This is the default option, and so this query is equivalent to the first example above.

OR operator

Diabetes OR childhood OR obesity

Finds documents containing at least one of the specified words or phrases. This leads to much broader search results.

NOT operator

"childhood obesity" NOT diabetes

Excludes documents containing the specified word or phrase. The above search will not return anything about diabetes.

NEAR operator

Diabetes (childhood NEAR obesity)

Finds terms that are close together, but not necessarily in the same phrase. Note the parentheses above; like most search engines, parentheses are processed using the usual Boolean order of operations.