DoD Financial Management Regulation
Comptroller DoDFMR query
Search Basics
The following Search Tips are a guide to using the FMR website search system to find the information you need. The guide starts with an overview of searching and moves from simple searches using a single word or phrase to more complicated searches. Use the many examples as an aid to formulating your own searches.
Quick Tips
For more information, click the links in the following quick tips:
- Use an asterisk or leave blank when the search criteria is unknown.
- Use a wildcard when only a portion of search criteria is known. Enter an asterisk at the beginning or end of your search term.
- Enter your search terms in lower case with a space between the terms.
- You can also enter a full question or concept in plain language.
- Capitalize proper nouns to search for specific people, places, or products.
- Enclose a phrase in double quotes to search for that exact phrase.
- Narrow your searches by using a + (plus sign) if a search term must appear on a page.
- Exclude pages by using a - (dash/minus sign) if a search term must not appear on a page.
*
sale* will retrieve sales, salesman
*man will retrieve salesman, mailman
sales offices
Where are the sales offices?
John Colter, Netscape Navigator
"museum of natural history" "museum of modern art"
museum +art
museum -Paris
Combine these techniques to create a specific search query. The better your description of the information you want, the more relevant your results will be.
museum +"natural history" dinosaur -Chicago
What Is a Search?
A search is the organized pursuit of information. Somewhere in a collection of documents, email messages, Web pages, and other sources, there is information that you want to find, but you have no idea where it is. The search system gives you the means of finding that information.
You conduct a search by issuing a query, which is simply a way of asking a question that will find the information you are looking for. Searching is often an iterative process. You submit a query and if the results list does not contain the information you are looking for, you modify the query until you locate a page that contains the answer.
Tools for Searching
The search system provides the following tools to help you find what you are looking for:
- A search form to enter your query
- Ways to broaden or narrow the extent of your search
- A results list of pages that match your query
The search system produces a ranked list where the documents at the top of the list are more likely to be relevant than the documents toward the bottom.
The relevance of a document is based on how many of the search terms are present in the document, how frequently the search terms occur, and how close the search terms are to each other.
Advanced Searching
More information and guidance about searching is available.