Exact match

Results are generated for exact matches with the word or words in the search expression. See the section below on the use of 'wildcards' for other types of matching.

Multiple keywords

When multiple words are listed, each word is considered separately using the AND operator. Products returned include all words, but the words will not necessarily be next to each other. For words to be side by side, use the 'phrase search'.

Phrase search

When words are grouped using single quotes, this is a phrase search. Only products containing the phrase are returned. Words listed without quotes are considered a multiple keyword search.

Use of wildcard characters

The CompuMaster Online Training Store search supports two types of wildcard: the percent ('%') and underscore '—'. The percent sign can be used anywhere within a keyword to represent any number of unspecified characters. The underscore represents a single unspecified character. It is most effective to use the percent wildcard before or after a keyword (no spaces). This allows you to create the following types of search:

Starts with
  -Add the wildcard to the end of a keyword, e.g., hik%

Contains
  -Prepend and append the keyword with wildcards, e.g., %hik%

Exact match
  -Use no wildcards for an exact match, e.g., hiking

Use of AND, OR operators

Your search can be enhanced by using the AND and OR operators when your search expression contains multiple keywords. The AND operator ensures that each of the keywords listed must exist within the product to be included in the results. The OR operator returns products that have at least one of the listed search words. You may use any combination of AND and OR, but you should be aware of the operator precedence rules listed below:

The default precedence rules promotes AND over OR as shown in the following example:

hiking AND boot OR calculator becomes (hiking AND boot) or calculator

hiking OR boot AND calculator becomes hiking OR (boot AND calculator)

The default operator is AND, which means that if your search expression consists of a list of keywords without any operators, the search expression will be processed as if there was an AND operator between each keyword.

Use of phrases

You can utilize phrase searches by enclosing a set of keywords by single quotes, for example, 'hiking boot'. This will return products whose name and/or description contains 'hiking boot'.

Use of common words

There are several hundred words in the English lexicon which are used so often that searches using these words would potentially return many more products than you would want to look at! Store search maintains a list of these words (also known as stop words) and does not spend time or resources searching on keywords that correspond to stop words.

Back to Store Search Help