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At LawMoose, because our search collections are relatively small and sites are pre-screened for relevance, it is usually best to start your search with a simple search term.

Just put in a single word you are looking for, like this: bankruptcy to see what you get.

If a single word search produces too many pages, or does not get at what you want in the right way, there are more ways to expand, limit, or focus your search.

You might try looking for a phrase. To search, for example, for Minnesota Attorney General, type that phrase surrounded by quotation marks, like this:

"Minnesota Attorney General".

Another way to limit the results you receive is to search for two or more words, each of which must be present somewhere on a page for it to appear in a search result. Just connect words with AND, like this:

Minnesota AND Attorney AND General.

If you know that more than one word might describe what you are looking for, you can expand the number of pages by using the word OR, like this:

school OR university OR college.

There are other connector words you can use to improve your searches. For example, you can use NOT to eliminate pages that include a certain word. Search for one word but NOT another, like this:

Ventura NOT California.

You can combine word and phrase searches, like the following examples:

expert AND "trial testimony"
expert AND "special skill"
expert NOT "treating physician".

Use parentheses to make sure related words are considered as a unit and in the right order, like this:

Minnesota AND ("Boundary Waters" OR "North Woods").

You can use the * as a wildcard, like this:

book*, bo*k, or *ook.

LawMoose currently does not distinguish between capital and lower case letters when searching. ATTORNEY and attorney and Attorney will each produce the same results.

The search engine will look for your search criteria in the index LawMoose builds for the pages it has found and can understand on sites within its scope of coverage.

Unless you tell it to search only a title by setting that preference, it will search both the title and its index of the body of web pages.

In most, but not all cases, LawMoose indexes to the bottom of pages. Longer pages may not be fully indexed, and we may adjust our indexing techniques from time to time and from collection to collection.

Some sites include a substantial amount of repetitive text on every page, in the form of navigation menus, disclaimers, or other standard elements. If your search results include pages of that sort, try using a different search term or combination of terms.