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To perform a legislative document search,
- Click the check box to the left of the categories you wish to search.
- Enter the word or words you are searching for and press Enter or click Search.
You may use single words, root words (e.g., crim* to find crime, crimes, criminal, and criminals), and AND, OR, or NOT searches.
Examples:
- Cat and dog will find any document in which BOTH "cat" and "dog" appear.
- Cat or dog will find any document in which EITHER "cat" or "dog" appears.
- Cat not dog will find any document in which "cat" appears and “dog” doesn’t appear.
- "Guide dog" will find any document in which "guide dog" appears as a phrase.
Searching for Words that Contain Compound Words or Hyphens
- Place an asterisk (*) between words to find variations of compound or hyphenated words. For example, fire*fighter will find documents with references to fire-fighter or firefighter.
- To search for the hyphenated version of a word or a WAC reference, type a hyphen (-) between the words or the WAC chapter and title.
- To find a multiple-word version of a term, enclose it in quotes, such as fire fighter.
- To look for all versions of a compound word in one search, type or between the selections. For example, to find all versions of the term child care (childcare, child-care, child care), you would type child*care or “child care.”
How the Search is Returned
The system returns a list of documents links that meet your search criteria beneath the search category list. The list does not appear in numerical order; rather, it is "ranked." In order to rank documents, the system looks for how often the word occurs in the document, how close the words are to each other, and whether the words occur within key phrases.
Navigating Through a Document
- To view a document's contents, click the green underlined link.
- To view the search term within the document, click Next Term. Continue clicking Next Term to see additional instances of the term in the document. To move backward through the document, click Previous Term.
- To go directly to the next document in the search results, click Next Document. To move backward through the document list, click Previous Document.
- To return to the Search screen, click Search.
Note: Due to heavily formatted documents, some documents will not display accurately unless viewed with a browser that supports HTML 3.2 or later, such as Internet Explorer 4.01+ or Netscape 4.0+.
If you would like to print the help text, use this version.
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