To make your searches more precise and more productive, you can:
Restrict (modify) the contents of your Library to constrain the scope of the search.
Choose the search setting "Titles Only" to search through book, chapter, and section titles rather than searching through the full text of documents.
Use special characters to mark your search phrases for literal, suffix-expansion, and "nearness" matching.
By adding or removing an AnswerBook from your Library, you can widen or narrow the scope of your search. See "Modifying Your Library".
The Titles Only option restricts searches to book titles and chapter and section headings. This search method is useful if you already know terms used in the titles or headings of documents you are looking for.
By adding special characters--quotation marks, parentheses, and asterisks--to your search phrases, you can make searching more precise. You can combine the characters to further refine your search.
Place the search phrase between double quotation marks to find documents that contain that literal phrase. For example, the search phrase "reading mail" finds documents containing that phrase. On the other hand, if you type reading mail, you will find documents containing one or both words.
Place words between parentheses to find documents with those words in proximity to each other. For example, the search phrase (reading mail) will find all documents that have "reading" and "mail" within a few lines of each other, in either order.
Place an asterisk at the end of a word to match all possible endings of the word. For example, the search phrase chang* will expand to "change," "changed," "changes," "changing," and so on.
If you do not know whether a term is one word, two words, or hyphenated in the documentation, you can insert the hyphen to look for all three forms. For example, to search for "mail tool," "mailtool," and "mail-tool," type mail-tool in the Search For pane.
Words connected by punctuation other than a hyphen are treated character for character as literal phrases, for example: /usr/local/bin, win_client_data, and in.rlogind.
You can combine any or all of the above search techniques to further refine your search. For example:
"chang* mail-tool" finds documents containing literal phrases such as "change mailtool," "change mail tool," "change mail tool," "change mail-tool," "changing mailtool," "changing mail tool," "changing mail-tool," and so on.
"display button" viewer searches for "display button" and "viewer" in proximity to each other.