Search Tips

The Red Hat Customer Portal gives you direct access to a huge volume of information, but it can sometimes be difficult to find exactly what you need. These search tips will help you improve your search results and find what you want more quickly.

Photo taken from opensourceway

Things to Remember:

  1. Every Word Counts

    By default, a search will return pages that contain all of the words that you search for. A search for proxy dns ports will give you pages that refer to proxies, DNS, and ports, but it won't necessarily give you pages that only refer to proxies and DNS.

  2. Case Doesn't Matter

    Search isn't case sensitive. A search for red hat enterprise linux will give you the same results as a search for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  3. Punctuation and Special Characters are Ignored

    Search will ignore any characters that aren't letters, numbers, or underscores (_). If you include any special characters (@#$%^&*()=+[] and others) in your search, they'll be ignored. Keep this in mind if you're searching for information related to code or commands that include punctuation. A search for $Home/.dmrc is the same as a search for home dmrc.

Search Basics

Start Simple

If you're not finding anything related to your search, broaden it by using fewer words. Every word in a search matters, so every word you add focuses the search and reduces the number of results you'll see. If you limit your search too much, you might miss useful results. Too many results is better than too few when you're starting out. You can always narrow it down in future searches once you have a better idea of what's out there.

Choose Your Words Carefully

If your search returns irrelevant results, enter words you think are likely to be unique or specific to the content you are looking for rather than a general description of the content. Using less-common words can help to cut out irrelevant results. For example, a search for downloading updates will return far too many results because the words "downloading" and "updates" are likely to be found on many pages. A better search would be for downloading updates yum because "yum" is a less-common word. However, you should try to use the most common way of describing the thing you're searching for. A search for usb flash drive will probably get you more results than a search for usb pen drive.

Search the Error

A cryptic error message full of unfamiliar terms and codes might not seem like much help, but it's just the thing a search engine needs to track down specific results. If you're looking for help with a specific issue and you have an error message in hand, use as many specific terms from the message as possible.

If at First You Don't Succeed...

Don't give up if your first search finds nothing useful; the information you want might still be out there. Try searching for what you want in a different way or even just putting your words in a different order.

Search Operators

Search operators are specific instructions you can add to fine tune your search. You might find some of these useful:

  • “ ”

    Using quotes will search for the exact phrase (including short words like "a" and "the" that would usually be ignored in a search). For example, a search for "the red hat story" will return pages that specifically refer to "the red hat story" rather than all pages that mention "red," "hat," and "story."

  • -

    Placing a hyphen before any search term will remove all search results that contain that word. For example, a search for installation -fedora will return all pages that mention installation, except for the ones that also mention Fedora.

  • OR

    By default, the search will return results that contain all of the terms you enter. If you want to get all the results for separate terms as though they were separate searches, you can use the OR operator between them. For example, a search for dns OR ports will return all the results that refer to DNS, all the results that refer to ports, and all the results that mention both. Remember that the OR operator must always be capitalized.

  • *

    An asterisk can stand in for any word. For example, a search for Red Hat Enterprise * will return results that refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise MRG, among others. However, you can't use this operator to substitute part of a word. A search for lin* will not find both Linux and linseed.

  • intitle:

    This operator can be placed immediately in front of any word that you want to appear in the title of the page you're looking for. For example, a search for intitle:yum updates will return all pages that have "yum" in the title and "updates" anywhere in the content.

  • allintitle:

    This operator is similar to intitle: but will only return results where the title contains all of the words that follow. For example, a search for allintitle:subscription installation will return all the pages that contain both "subscription" and "installation" in the title. This operator cannot be combined with any others.

  • case:[case#]

    Much like the intitle: and allintitle: operators, case: (followed by a case number) will return the specific case with the number entered. For example, case:12345 will return case #12345.