Chico State

Help

Tips and resources for navigating the Chico State website and reporting issues.

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CSU, Chico Information


Search Help

Query Syntax

Case Sensitivity

Search is not case sensitive. A search for "chico" will match both "chico" and "Chico".

Multiple Search Terms

web services

By default, when searching for multiple terms the AND operator is used. This means that in the example above, search will look for documents that contain both "web" and "services".

See Boolean Operators for other ways to search multiple terms.

Exact Search or Phrase Search

"chico state"

If you need to search for a phrase, enclose the term in double quotes. Searching for a phrase will return only documents that contain the phrase as it appears between the quotes. The example above will only return a document if it contains the phrase "chico state" (those two words, in that order, with one space in between).

Wildcard Searches

Asterisk (*) Wildcard
California State University, *

The asterisk (*) operator serves as a single- or multi-word wildcard. In the above example, results could include "California State University, Chico" in addition to "California State University, Channel Islands."

Proximity Searches

chico AROUND(5) state

Proximity search find words that are a within a specified distance of each other. To do a proximity search, use the AROUND(x) function between two terms. The example above will search for "chico" and "state" within 5 words of each other.

Grouping

(chico | state) AND web

Chico State's search supports using parenthesis to group clauses (forming sub-queries). In the example above, search would look for documents that contain either "chico" and/or "state" and "web" and "web". Put another way, the example would match documents that contain:

  • the terms "chico" and "web"
  • the terms "state" and "web"
  • the terms "chico", "state", and "web"

Boolean Operators

"AND" Operator
chico state
chico AND state

The "AND" operator links two terms to find matching documents in which both terms exist. By default, searches containing multiple terms join those terms with an "AND" operator. This means that if no Boolean operator is used between two terms, the "AND" operator is assumed.

In the above examples, a matching document would be any document that contains the words "chico" and "state" (in no particular arrangement).

Minus Operator (-)
chico -state

The minus operator "-" excludes documents that contain the term after the "-" symbol.

In the above example, a matching document would be any document that contains the word "chico" but not the word "state"

"OR" or Pipe Operator (|)
"web services" | "university communications"

One pipe "|" (the pipe shares a key with backslash on standard keyboards) is equivalent to "OR" and links two terms to find matching documents in which either term exists.

In the above example, a matching document would be any document that contains the either "web services" and/or "university communications".

Limiting Your Search to a Specific Department

cascade site:www.csuchico.edu/web

The CSU, Chico website consists of nearly 50,000 documents. Finding a specific result can be difficult, but you can increase your chances of success by limiting the search to a specific department.

To limit your search to a single department, simply add site:www.csuchico.edu/{dept} after your search term(s), where "{dept}" is the root URL for the department in question. Be sure to remove any spaces after "site:".

In the above example, we'd be looking for any documents within www.csuchico.edu/web(opens in new window) that contain the term "cascade."