Hi Gavin Always grateful for input I was not after wild cards although that would be very useful, I was asking about limiters, as in a search of google, and many other sites of say "North Britain Militia" or *North Britain Militia* would find hits with those words in that particular order as would North.Britain.Militia in google The NAS does not seem to operate in that way (or does it?) To start with this is the url I am using http://www.nas.gov.uk/ Nowhere can I see a "simple search" (probably staring me in the face :-) I see Site search top right but there is but one search box and that has the already described problems of differentiating between words Its obvious to me I am looking in the wrong place so if you could point me in the direction of the obvious I would be most grateful I have used the National Archives in England without a problem for many years, using their download system with great ease but the NAS evades me Best wishes Nivard Ovington, in Cornwall (UK) > I don't know about wildcarding, but there is an obvious option on the > "simple search" page to specify your search terms as "phrase", "all > words (AND)" or "any word (OR)": This is clearly described just beneath > the box where you enter your search terms: > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Use "phrase" to look for exact matches to a group of words, for > example John Smith would find only records containing this name; Use > "all words" to look for records which contain all of the specified words > in any order, for example a search for John Smith would also find a > record containing "the smith in the village was called John Brown"; use > "any word" to find all records which contain any of the specified words > - in this case all records containing "John" and all records containing > "Smith".