Search Tips

Using Upper- and Lower-Case letters:

Search terms are not case-sensitive. Lower- and upper-case letters return the same search results. For example, searching for Lung Cancer or lung cancer will yield identical results.

Understanding the way Search works:

The default search is “AND“. For example, when you search for “lung cancer smoking“, the search engine will find only those items that have the words lung AND cancer AND smoking in them.

The closer the words appear in the text to one another, the higher the item’s ranking in the results list.

NetWellness search includes:

NetWellness original articles and reports
Ask an Expert questions and answers
ADAM Health Encyclopedia references
OSU Patient Education links
Relevant external links to approved websites

Improving your Search results:

1. Be specific. Enter more than one word, if necessary. For example, if you’re looking for information on Lung Cancer, type in both words rather than just Lung.

2. If there are no results for your search, try another search, using only the most important words relating to your topic. For example, to find items on lung cancer, type in lung cancer, not “What are some treatments or signs of lung cancer”.

3. To broaden your search, use the word OR. For example, searching for lung OR pulmonary will return items that have at least one of these words.

4. To exclude words from your search, use the word NOT. For example, to find items on lung cancer that do not mention smoking, type lung cancer NOT smoking.

5. To search for a specific phrase, use “quotation marks“. To find references to the American Lung Association, type it in the search tool with quotation marks around it like this: “American Lung Association”. This will find only references that contain this exact phrase.

6. To put your search into a specific order, use parentheses ( ) which tells the search engine what to do first. For example, to find items on lung or pulmonary and cancer or neoplasm, type (lung OR pulmonary) AND (cancer OR neoplasm).

7. To search for a word with several different endings, use an asterisk * at the end of the main word. For example, to find smoke or smokes or smoking or smoked, type smok*. Use a question mark ? to limit these alternate endings to just one letter. For example, to find birth or births but not birthing or birthday, type birth?.

For more information: