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Refine Your Web Search

General Tips

FindLaw LawCrawler is powered by Google which returns web pages that contain all the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. Your new query will return a smaller subset of the pages Google found for your original "too-broad" query.

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign ("-") immediately in front of the term you want to avoid. (Be sure to include a space before the minus sign.)

For example, the search

will return pages about stanford that do not contain the word "harvard".

You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes ("like this") will appear together in all returned documents exactly as you have entered them. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.

Certain characters serve as phrase connectors. Hyphens, slashes, periods, equal signs, and apostrophes are phrase connectors. Phrase connectors work like quotes; for example, mother-in-law is treated as a phrase even if the three words aren't in quotes.