Tips for searching the Handbook

Note: All searches will return results based on a search of both the Occupational Outlook Handbook and the Career Guide to Industries.

At its simplest, a search can be on a word or a phrase. For example, if you want to find all instances of teachers, type teachers, and to find all computer programmers, type computer programmers. But with the tips on this page, you can focus your search to give you better results.

• Place OR between two keywords to find all instances of either one or the other, for example:

  lawyers OR attorneys

  This search finds all pages that mention lawyers or attorneys or both.
• Look for words with the same prefix. For example, typing:

  teach*

  in the search box will find pages containing teach, teaching, teacher, teachers, and so on.
  
  Likewise, typing:

  registered nurse*

  will find registered nurse and registered nurses.
  
  Typing:

  physical therap*

  will find physical therapist, physical therapists, and physical therapy;
  
  and typing:

  lawyer* OR attorney*

  will find all pages containing any of the following: lawyer, lawyers, attorney, or attorneys.
• Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the search box type

  sell**

  to find sell, selling, and sold.
• Refine your searches with AND to require certain text in your search results. For example, if you type:

  restaurant AND hotel

  you will find all the pages containing both restaurant and hotel.
• Refine your searches with AND NOT to exclude certain text from your search. For example, typing:

  food AND NOT restaurant*

  will find all pages that contain food but do not contain restaurant or restaurants.
• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, with both of these combinations, accountants AND computers and accountants NEAR computers, the search engine looks for the words accountants and computers on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.

In the Occupational Outlook Handbook, the names of occupations are written in plural form in the titles of the descriptions about individual occupations (teachers, lawyers, nurses).  However, in the occupation descriptions themselves, occupations may be referred to in either plural or singular form (teachers or teacher). To find all the references in OOH to an occupation, search for both the plural and singular forms, or search for words with the same prefix, as described above.

Last Modified Date: February 27, 2004