Oklahoma Public Legal Research System Sponsored by the OU College of Law and the OBA Family Law Section Patrick Sweeney passed away Thursday November 7, 2023. Patrick had dedicated the last 26 years to updating and maintaining Oklahoma Public Legal Research databases.

Using Advanced Search

• AND
• OR
• NEAR
• ANDNOT
• Using Multiple Search Operators
• Usage Notes

When you use the Advanced Search option to search for information, you can use the search operators AND, OR, NEAR, and ANDNOT to narrow your search. Each operator is described below. You can enter an operator in either lowercase or uppercase letters ("and" is interpreted the same as "AND").

AND

Bees love Honey

This phrase finds any topic containing the three words "Bees," "love," and "Honey." This is the same as specifying Bees AND love AND Honey. However, when quotes are used, the system searches for the entire phrase. For example:

"Bees love Honey"

This phrase finds any topic containing the phrase "Bees love Honey."

OR

The OR operator selects topics containing either phrase connected by OR operators. For example:

Bees OR Honey

This query displays topics containing either the word "Bees" or the word "Honey."

NEAR

The NEAR operator selects any topic in which one phrase appears within a certain number of words of the second phrase. The default value is 8 words. For example:

Bees NEAR Honey

This query finds any topic in which the word "Bees" appears within 65 characters before or after the word "Honey."

ANDNOT

The ANDNOT operator selects any topic that does contain the phrase preceding ANDNOT, but doesn't contain the phrase following ANDNOT. For example:

Bees ANDNOT Honey

This query finds topics containing the word "Bees" but not the word "Honey."

Using Multiple Search Operators

When you use the Search button to search for information, you can use multiple search operators to define more complex search criteria. For example, if you enter:

honey AND bees ANDNOT hives

in the Advanced Search box, the system will match topics that contain the words "honey" and "bees" but do not contain the word "hives."

By default, operators are evaluated from left to right. You can use parentheses to specify a different order-- Operators within parentheses are evaluated first.