To group an exact sequence of words, use quotes. For example, the query "big thinking" (quotes included) would not generate a hit from "The Magic of Thinking Big". Without quotes, the sentence would be found. If a search term has at least one capital letter, like "parIS", the search will be case sensitive with respect to that word - that is, only documents containing "parIS" will be found. On the other hand, a lowercase term like "paris" will find "Paris", "PARIS", or "parIS".The Lifescope site search finds whole words, not character strings. A search for "in" would turn up only that word, not "bin", "inside", or "rescinded". To perform a string search, preface your term with the dollar sign - a query on "$in" would find all words lists above. Note that more complex wildcard searches using the asterisk are not permitted. Including the asterisk in your query will return a list of all pages, and that is its only function.
Each term may be preceded by the standard Boolean operators not, and, or or. If you search for "eat not diet", you'll find all documents containing the word "eat" except those documents which also contain the word "diet". If you type in "and eat and diet and pizzas", you'll find only those documents which contain all three search terms. The default value is or. Thus, a search for "eat diet pizzas" would return pages with at least one of any of the three terms.
Altavista's shorthand notation works too. A search on "eat -diet" is equivalent to the first example, and "+eat +diet +pizzas" will return the same documents as the second.
Boolean operators can also act on quotations: a search on '+time +management not "time management" ' would return only those documents where "time" and "management" appear separately.
These rules are based on Altavista's query syntax; a look at their Search Tips may prove useful.