Caution: LII is a small database of about 22,000 items. The search strategies you use for Google or other search engines may not work well in LII, however, these tips may help.
Our best advice: Keep in mind you are searching our descriptions of the websites, not the sites themselves. Use fewer, broader terms. Instead of Susan Sarandon or Training Day, try movie reviews, actors, or movies. Instead of chocolate pudding, try desserts.
LII supports many common search operators, singly or in combination, including search limiters such as and, or and not, wildcarding, nesting, and quoted expressions. Stemming (a form of truncation, discussed below) is enabled by default. Search results are returned ranked by relevance. Most matched terms will be bolded on the results page, except for keywords and Library of Congress subjects.
And: LII by default supports an and search (find items that include all of the terms: butter and cheese). You do not need to specify the word and unless you are doing a search with other operators. wine beer provides the same results as wine and beer.
Or: find all LII items that include either terms: cheese or butter.
Not: find all items that have the first term but do not have the second term: butter not peanut.
Nesting: Nesting means using parentheses so that search operations are performed in the sequence you intend. Compare (cheese or wine) not racing versus cheese or wine not racing. LII supports multiple nests, e.g. ((cheese or wine)not beer) and butter
Quoted searches: Searches letter by letter, exactly as written within the quotation marks. Try "facts for features" and then compare without the quotation marks to see how a quoted search can be very precise.
LII supports wildcarding, that is, truncating searches with an asterisk to retrieve all items matching the letters before the asterisk: suffrag*.
However, most searches don't require truncation, because LII has built-in stemming, which is like truncation but more powerful. Stemming provides automatic support for a wide variety of word variations: run also retrieves running, dessert retrieves desserts, and vice versa.
Sometimes stemming yields too many results. (Try a search for communism.) You can disable stemming in Advanced Search.
Stopwords are terms that you can't use in a search engine. LII stopwords are the limiters and, or, and not. Quoted searches are the best way to get around these stopwords. See the difference with these two searches: do not call versus "do not call"
An LII basic search searches against words found in the description, title, website address, Library of Congress subject, LII topics, and additional keywords (if any).
Search results are ordered by relevance, measured by the number of times match words appear in the LII item. An item that uses the term cancer three times will appear above an item that uses the term cancer two times.
Some LII search terms--the terms you search LII with--are highlighted (bolded) in results. Search term highlighting displays for Title, URL, Description, Topic, and URL. Search term highlighting does not display for items in the View Info box, such as Publisher, LC Subject, or Site Author.
Also try browsing our topic pages. We have hundreds of special pages on topics such as Health, Crafts, Cooking, Sports, Libraries, and much more. You may find we have conveniently co-located information you are seeking. What could be easier?
LII uses SWISH-E as its search engine.
The LII Advanced Search help page provides tips for using LII Advanced Search, plus information about LII search fields and other advanced search options.
Understanding
Search Results offers insight
into our search results and tips for emailing and printing LII
items.
