Global warming is a phrase, as is chronic fatigue syndrome. Use phrase-searching capability when the words you are searching for must appear next to each other and must appear in the order in which you typed them. For example, you are trying to find information on the effects of chlorofluorocarbons on global warming. You might want to retrieve results that have the word chlorofluorocarbons very close to the phrase global warming . Truncation is the process of looking for multiple forms of a word.
Some search engines refer to truncation as stemming.
For example, if you were researching postmodern art, you might want to retrieve all the records that had the root word postmodern, as well as postmodernist and postmodernism. Using wildcards allows you to search for words that have most of the word in common, except for maybe a letter or two. For example, we might want to search for both woman and women. Case Sensitivity Case sensitivity is an important feature, especially if you are looking for proper names. Some search engines recognize capitalization, but some do not.