Your search results will appear in the same window as a list of everything that was found. If the search found a lot of results, you can click on "Next" and "Previous" to go from page to page.

When you click on one of the results, it will open in a new browser window so that you can still refer to the list of results. Depending upon your browser, you might find that this new window doesn't always show on top of the other windows, but it will be there.

A "word" is any number of true word characters (letters and digits), optionally separated by no more than one sequential single quote (') character. For example, "wasn't" is a single word, but "wasn''t" is the two words "wasn" and "t". A word has to be at least three characters long, or it will be ignored. Certain other words that are very common ("and", "the", and things like that) are also ignored. Also, single quotes at the ends of words are ignored; only single quotes inside a word are matched.

A search is pretty literal minded. The "word" car-port is broken down into the two words car and port, so you don't want to use hyphens as part of a word. (They have a special meaning that will be explained later.) Also, the search word car will not find the word "cars". There is a way to do that, and that will also be explained later.

Searches are not case sensitive.

To do a simple search, just enter words separated by spaces like this: construction cement. The search will look for products that contain any of your words. The search will try to find all of your words, but it will also find products that only have one or two of your words in them. It will list the products with the "best" results first.

To require a certain word, put a plus sign (+) immediately before the word: construction +cement. A search like that will only return products that have the word "cement" in them, but it will prefer products that also have the word "construction" in them. You can use plus signs in front of as many words as you want.

Sometimes you don't want to see certain words in your results. For example, you might want to look for products that have the word "air" in them, but you aren't interested in air transportation. You can tell the search to exclude certain words by using a hyphen (-) immediately before the words you don't want: air -airport -airplane -aircraft.

A search for car will not find the word "cars". To get around that problem, you can use an asterisk (*) immediately after the word: car*. This will find any word that begins with "car", which is not exactly what you want. It will find "car", "cars", "carpet", "cargo", and so on. If you use an asterisk, you will probably want to use hyphens to narrow your search: car* -carpet -cargo. Of course, in this simple example it would be easier to use car cars, but you should get the idea.

If you want to search for an exact phrase, simply enclose it in double quotes ("). You must type the phrase exactly the way you want to search for it, so that "some words" will find "Some words of wisdom" but not "Some plain words of wisdom".

You can use a phrase as though it were a word: +"some words" +wisdom would find "Some words of wisdom", because we require both the phrase "some words" and the word "wisdom". It would not find "Some plain words of wisdom" because the phrase "some words" doesn't match even though the word "wisdom" does.

Sometimes you want to look for more than one word, but you are more interested in some words than in others so you want to make them "better" results. Perhaps you are interested in "fruit", but especially "bananas". You could force the search to find both words by using plus signs (+fruit +bananas), but then you might not find "apples". There is a way to make "bananas" a more important word, by using the greater-than (>) sign. Your search would look like this: +fruit >bananas.

In a similar way, you can make a word less important by using a less-than (<) sign. To look for "fruit", but to put "bananas" nearer the bottom of the results, you can search for +fruit <bananas. The search will still look for "bananas", just not as eagerly.

The less-than sign makes a word less important than the other words in your search. You can make a word actually count against a product by putting a tilde (~) in front of it. Now the search will consider any results that have the word "bananas" in them to be a last resort.

If you want to do even more complicated searches, you can use parentheses to make combinations that are even more exact. Suppose you wanted to find rows that contain the words "apple" and "turnover", or "apple" and "strudel" (in any order), but you prefer "apple turnover" over "apple strudel". Your search would look like this: +apple +(>turnover <strudel).