Quick Tips to Get You Started

Saving Searches

Use Highlighting and Ctrl+F to Find the Relevant Part of a Document

  1. When you click on a result from the search results page, your search terms will be highlighted. (Note: highlighting does not operate in SCAO forms.) The search engine returns results that include synonyms of your search terms to improve the chance of finding all relevant results; however, they will not be  highlighted.

    • Find the search terms by scrolling through the document. Or you can jump to a search term by using the Ctrl+F (Command+F for Mac) function. Hit the Control and the F keys at the same time, enter one of your search terms in the box, and click the arrow or Next to find your exact terms throughout the content.

    • Click remove [add] highlighting if you want to turn highlighting off [on].

Use Quotation Marks or Plus Sign to Find Exact Terms

  1. To find an exact phrase, use quotation marks: “principal residence exemption”
  2. To find an individual word that you want in an exact form, use a plus sign [+] in front of the word. The plus sign must be preceded by a space. For example, if you search libel, the search engine will use a thesaurus and return results that contain the words libel and/or defamation. But if you search +libel, it will only return results with the word libel.

Use a Minus Sign to Exclude Terms to Narrow Results

  1. Put a minus sign [-] immediately before a word to exclude content that contains this word from your search results. The minus sign must be preceded by a space. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the minus sign in front of all of them. For example, e-discovery -health -”federal courts” will retrieve documents that contain the word e-discovery but will exclude documents that also contain the word health or the exact phrase federal courts.

Use More Search Terms to Get Fewer Results

  1. For general information, use one or two words without quotation marks: bankruptcy
  2. For more specific information, use three or more words: bankruptcy exemptions “Chapter 11” 

Find a Particular Type of Results

  1. Under Results by Type, you can see how many results there are of each type (for example, Online Books, OnDemand Seminars, MI Supreme Court Opinions, Ct of Appeals Published). Click on the name of the type to see only those results.”