Our site is indexed so the search is fast.

(If you happen to get a very long list of responsive pages, they may take a bit to download and for your browser to compose the page.)

If a single word search produces too many pages, or does not get at what you want in the right way, there are more ways to expand, limit, or focus your search.

You might try looking for a phrase. To search, for example, for House of Representatives, type that phrase surrounded by quotation marks, like this:

"House of Representatives".

Another way to limit the results you receive is to search for two or more words, each of which must be present. Just connect as many words as you want with AND, like this:

House AND Representatives AND Internet.

If you know that more than one word might describe what you are looking for, you can expand the number of pages by using the word OR, like this:

school OR university OR college.

There are other connector words you can use to improve your searches. For example, you can use NOT to eliminate pages that include a certain word, like this:

NOT California.

You can search for one word but NOT another, like this:

Southern NOT California.

You can combine word and phrase searches, like the following examples:

expert AND "trial testimony"
expert AND "special skill"
expert NOT "treating physician".

Use parentheses to make sure related words are considered as a unit and in the right order, like this:

Minnesota AND ("Boundary Waters" OR "North Woods").

You can use the * as a wildcard, like this:

book*, bo*k, or *ook.

Use all lower case or all upper case unless you want your search to be case sensitive.

We have two search zones: the files in the Internet Law Library are one zone. The rest of the web page files on our site are the other zone. Our web slide shows are not searchable, but we provide tables of contents for each of them.

The search engine will look for your search criteria in the full text of a page. That means that if you use a single search word or phrase that appears in a menu or footer element, you will not receive useful results.

In that case, be more specific by searching for a longer or different phrase or using some other word formula.