CogWeb

Search Tips

CogWeb features the following dedicated search engines:

  1. The general search engine, currently including CogWeb and Evolution and the Social Mind
  2. A Cognitive Literary Studies search engine, combining three related sites as listed
  3. An Evolutionary Psychology search engine, including four related sites as listed
  4. A Proverb search engine, combining CogWeb's proverb pages with some external sites

All engines present the following basic format. To perform a search, type what you are looking for into the search box:

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Any word All words Exact phrase Sounds like 
 

This search will find the word "consciousness" in all documents on CogWeb and display the first five results. (Outside of the Search Tips page, searches display the first hundred results.)

There are several ways of getting either more specific or more general search results:

Use multiple words
Example: conscious mind
Use similar words
Example: metaphor blending figuration
Use quotation marks
Example: "animal play" rhesus
Use "sounds like"
Example: Povinello
Use plus (+) or minus (-)
Syntax: +"cognitive" -"evolution"
Use field searches (title, desc, keys, body, alt, url)
Syntax: field:text or field:"text text"
Use wildcards
Syntax: te*t

Use multiple words
Multiple words are useful both for narrowing and for broadening searches.

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 
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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 
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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Use related terms
Since different authors may use slightly different terminologies to discuss the same topic, it may be useful to enter several related terms:

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Use quotation marks
If you want to look for documents that contain a phrase and one or more words, you can use quotation marks:

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 


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Use "sounds like"
Make sure your search terms are spelled correctly. If you're not sure of the spelling, check the "sounds like" box and the search engine will attempt to find words that sound similar to your search terms:

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Use plus (+) or minus (-)
Use a plus sign when your search term or phrase must appear in the search results. Use a minus sign to indicate undesirable term(s). The plus sign tells the search engine that a certain word or phrase is required in the search results, and a minus sign indicates that a word or phrase must be absent in the search results.

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Use field searches
Field searches allow you to create specific searches for words that appear in a specific part of a document. A field search can be performed on body text (body:), title text (title:), alt text (alt:), meta description (desc:), meta key words (keys:) or URL (url:). The field name should be in lowercase and immediately followed by a colon. There should be no spaces between the colon and the search term.

The field searches can be followed by a word or phrase. Phrases must be contained within quotation marks. For field searches, leave the radio button in the "Any word" position.

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Any wordAll wordsExact phraseSounds like 
 

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Use wildcards
Wildcard searches can expand the number of matches for a particular request. The * character is used as the wildcard character. For instance, searching for wh* will find the words what, why, when, whether, and any other word that starts with wh:

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Searching for *her* will find the words here, whether, together, gathering, and any other word that contains her anywhere in the word:

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Wildcards may be combined with the standard plus (+) and minus (-) modifiers, quotes for phrases, as well as the field search specifiers. +wh* -se*ch will find all pages which have a word that starts with wh and which does not contain a word that starts with se and ends with ch:

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 "wh* are" will find the phrases where are, what are, why are, etc.:

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You can use masks to find telephone numbers and other regular expressions:

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