Scribd
Search for documents and presentations
Search for documents, books, presentations, and business, academic papers archived on Scribd's social publishing site, where tens of millions of people share original writings and documents.
Instructions
The OR operator |
can be used to search for documents about either
cats or kitties:
The AND operator can be used to search for documents about both space and
exploration. The AND operator is used by default, but can be made explicit
with the &
symbol:
The NOT operator -
or
!
can be used to exclude documents about landscapes when searching for Vista:
You can surround phrases in quotes "
, for instance to search for famous
quotations:
shakespeare "to be or not to be"
You can use the proximity operator ~
to search for a group of words
within a certain distance of each other. For instance, to search for the words
"Saturn", "rings", and "size", all within a span of less than 10 words:
The quorum operator /
can be used to do fuzzy matching. If you would
like to find documents that have at least three of the five words "college",
"university", "learning", "study", "library":
"college university learning study library"/3
OR operator precedence is higher than AND, so looking for cat | dog | mouse
means looking for ( cat | dog | mouse )
and not (looking for cat) | dog |
mouse
.
Important note on parentheses: You can use parentheses to override the normal precedence order; however, nested parentheses are not allowed. The NOT operator cannot be used within parentheses, only at the top level.
What it's good for
- Search through documents published by their authors
- Excellent tool to search for entertainment and information
- Useful for finding quotes in books/articles
- Read, print, and download documents
- Scribd's viewer is interactive: if you don’t know what a term means, highlight and click on it to bring up an information box