You can search the whole collection for text using the text search box. This is a stemming search engine, so generally speaking, if you search for a word such as love, the search engine will apply stemming and return related forms such as loving and loves. For finer control, there are two wild-card characters that can be used in searches: asterisk (*) and question mark (?). An asterisk represents zero or more characters; a question mark represents a single character. A wild-card search allows you to truncate endings, so that a search for usur* will return results that include usury, usurie, and usurer. The wild card can also be used within a word to return all possible variations in that position. For example, a search for w*ld would return wild, world, and withheld, and so on. Combining internal and terminal wild cards would return more variants. For example, w?ld* would yield results that include wild, wildest, and wilderness.

You can also use plus and minus signs to specify that a term must or must not be in the results. For example, searching for +love +like -hate will find documents that contain both love and like but not hate.

Using the advanced search filters, you can limit your search to specific kinds of document in the collection, or to specific date ranges. Some types of document have their own unique filters; for example, the collection of Life records have keyword filters and type filters, so if you are looking in the Life records, you can use these filters. However, if you apply these filters while searching for a different Genre / Document type, no results will be found.