Help
Search Tips
TheUSDA.gov's search engine quickly and easily puts information at your fingertips.
The engine allows you to choose just how broad, or narrow, you would like your search
to be. The search incorporates relevant content from all USDA agency and office sites
into your results.
Basic Search
Enter your keywords and phrases in the Search text box. Press the "Go" button to process.
Special Query Terms:
- Include Query Term - Place a "+" sign before an essential word to include it
within all search results (eg: animal +health).
- Exclude Query Term - Place a "-" sign before a term that you want to exclude from
the search results (eg: imports -dairy).
- Phrase Search - Search for complete phrases by enclosing them in quotation marks or connecting them with hyphens (eg: "food guide pyramid").
- Boolean OR Search - Use an uppercase OR between terms to retrieve information that contains either word A or word B (eg: food OR nutrition).
- Title Search - Place "intitle:" in front of a query term to restrict results to documents containing that word in the title (eg: intitle:USDA).
- Title Search (all) - Initiate search terms by "allintitle:" to restrict results to those with all of the query words in the title (eg: allintitle: food safety).
- URL Search (term) - Place "inurl:" before a query term to restrict the results to documents containing that word in the result URL (eg: inurl:USDA).
URL Search (all) - Initiate search terms by "allinurl:" to restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the result URL (eg: allinurl: USDA gov).
Advanced Search
The Advanced Search offers the same functionality as the Basic Search,
but it also provides additional options for reducing the total number of search results.
Limit your results with extra search options:
- Return pages written in any language, English, or Spanish.
- Return results where specified keywords and phrases occur anywhere in the page, in the title of the page, or in the URL of the page.
Choose how your search results display:
- Choose the number of results you would like per page.
- Sort the results by relevance or by date.
Other Helpful Resources
Refer to these additional resources if you are still experiencing problems finding what you need.