Open Government Guide Advanced Search Page

Open Government Guide

Published by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

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ADVANCED SEARCH

Select one of the two ways to perform a full-text search:

Natural language: A natural language search will search all the terms you enter and rate pages based on how many of the words they contain and how early they appear in the page.

Boolean terms: A boolean search is much more specific, and allows you to enter search "connector" terms like AND, OR and NOT. It also allows the use of parentheses to help define a search, quotation marks to search exact phrases, < and > to decrease or increase the term's importance in the search, * (the asterisk 'wildcard') to match the root of a word, and + and - marks at the start of words to either require the word or exclude pages with the word.

Enter your search terms

Optional: Limit search by states:

(If no boxes are checked below, all states will be searched.)

Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
D.C.

Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky

Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana

Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio

Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah

Vermont
Virginia
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming

Search rules

Search terms must be 4 or more letters; 2- and 3-letter words are not indexed.
Words that are too common are not indexed, and the search engine will report that no matches were found.
Search terms are not case-sensitive; smith, Smith and SMITH will return the same results.

Search examples

Natural language:

notice of public meetings

(will find any page with any of the words notice, open or meetings (of is skipped). Those pages that contain all three words early in the page will be displayed first, and subsequent entries in the search result list become less and less relevant.

Boolean search:

notice and (public or open) and (meeting*)

(will find pages with the word notice, and either public or open, as well as meeting or meetings.

+attorney -general

(will find pages with the word attorney, but not those that have the term attorney general.

>attorney <general

(will find pages with the words attorney or general, but those with attorney but not general will be rated much higher.

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© 2006, 2001, 1997, 1993, 1989 The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 1100, Arlington, VA 22209. Phone: (703) 807-2100 • (Contact us.) See copyright page for reprint information for classroom or nonprofit use.