The engine uses an altavista like syntax. You can use and's, or's and not's as well as the shorthands +, |, and - respectively. By default, the engine interprets a series of three words as X and Y and Z.

You can also look for exact phrases by placing the phrase in quotes - ie. "full moon" looks for full and moon adjacent to each other.

By default, the search function matches words with the same stem as the search query. Thus a search for organization will also match a page with "organizations". You can use the * wildcard to match a greater degree of word stem variations - ie. a search on hyper* will match hypertext and hypermedia.

Once your viewing a set of search results, you can browse topical ares by clicking on the category link in a page result. Only a percentage of home pages (as opposed to subpages) have category links. This percentage will increase with time.