Help

Search Tips

USDA.gov's search engine quickly and easily puts information at your fingertips. The engine allows you to choose just how broad, or narrow, you would like your search to be. The search incorporates relevant content from all USDA agency and office sites into your results.

Basic Search

Enter your keywords and phrases in the Search text box. Press the "Go" button to process.

Special Query Terms:
  • Include Query Term - Place a "+" sign before an essential word to include it within all search results (eg: animal +health).
  • Exclude Query Term - Place a "-" sign before a term that you want to exclude from the search results (eg: imports -dairy).
  • Phrase Search - Search for complete phrases by enclosing them in quotation marks or connecting them with hyphens (eg: "food guide pyramid").
  • Boolean OR Search - Use an uppercase OR between terms to retrieve information that contains either word A or word B (eg: food OR nutrition).
  • Title Search - Place "intitle:" in front of a query term to restrict results to documents containing that word in the title (eg: intitle:USDA).
  • Title Search (all) - Initiate search terms by "allintitle:" to restrict results to those with all of the query words in the title (eg: allintitle: food safety).
  • URL Search (term) - Place "inurl:" before a query term to restrict the results to documents containing that word in the result URL (eg: inurl:USDA).
  • URL Search (all) - Initiate search terms by "allinurl:" to restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the result URL (eg: allinurl: USDA gov).

Last Modified: 05/04/2018