• How do I find what I'm looking for?
• What are my search options?
• Does your search recognize punctuation or special characters?
• Do you support wildcard searches?
• How can I find products by manufacturer?
• Is there a search by category?
• How do I sort my search results?
• How do I filter my search results?

How do I find what I'm looking for?

Our search can be accessed through any page of our site. Search textbox is located at the top right corner of the every page. Simply enter the text you would like to search for and click the gray button:

The search functionality supports searching for one or more specific words and/or phrases. A word is one or more characters without spaces or punctuation while a valid phrase can consist of multiple words with spaces or punctuation between them. For example, 'MSDN' is a word while 'MSDN Universal 7.0' is a phrase.

The search phrase can combine multiple words by using the boolean operators 'AND' and 'OR' to enhance your search. Furthermore, words can be negated by the use of the 'AND NOT' boolean operator. These boolean operators generally adhere to the following rules:

• NOT is applied before AND
• NOT can only occur after AND, as in AND NOT. The OR NOT operator is not allowed.
• NOT cannot be specified before the first term
• AND is applied before OR

Boolean operators of the same type (AND, OR) are associative and can therefore be applied in any order.

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What are my search options?

Our Search allows you to search the following type of product information:

• Manufacturer/Publisher name
• Product Description
• Manufacturer Part Number
• Part Number
• Category

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Does your search recognize punctuation or special characters?

Our search doesn't recognize special characters such as exclamation points, question marks, or the @ sign. These types of characters are so common that including them in a search would greatly slow the delivery of the search results. Additionally, the use of punctuation on the web is so inconsistent that including it in the query often does more harm than good to the relevance of your search results.

While we don't currently offer a way to force our search to recognize all special characters, we understand that many useful search terms do contain such characters, therefore, we have exceptions such as C++.

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Do you support wildcard searches?

A wildcard in a search query can be indicated by an asterisk (*) and will match one or more entire words of text so that the query matches a contiguous sequence of words.

A wildcard is automatically added to the end of all alphanumeric and numeric search terms that you enter. For example, a search term like “Component” will automatically have a wildcard added to the end of it, resulting in a search for “Component*”. The search results would include products with “Component”, “ComponentA”, “ComponentB”, “ComponentC”, etc. in their product descriptions.

Use an asterisk (“*”) to add a wildcard to your keyword search terms. For example, a search for the term “Comp*” will display all results that start with “Comp” or a search for the term "*zip" will display all results that end with "zip" like "winzip". We do not support wildcard search in the middle of the word.

If you would like to disable wildcarding, simply place quotation marks around the search terms that you do not want wildcarded.

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How can I find products by manufacturer?

One method to locate products by manufacturer is to visit the partner pages by accessing the BRANDS link in the left side navigation under the PRODUCTS heading. Once the cursor is placed over this link a list of premier partners will display to the immediate right.     Clicking on these manufacturers will display that manufacturer's specific partner page that includes information about new releases, featured products, and etc. From here links exist that will display products lines for that specific brand.     Another method to see a listing of all products for a manufacturer is to click on the manufacturer name link on either the product page or the result pages (category navigation/search results).

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Is there a category search?

Within the left side navigation under the PRODUCTS heading each of our departments (SOFTWARE, HARDWARE, BOOKS/TRAINING) can be located. Once the cursor is placed over the specific department a menu list of categories/subcategories for that department will display to the immediate right. Each of these departments and categories/subcategories within the hierarchy can be clicked to display any featured products or specials that exist within that department/category or you can navigate to the lowest level in order to display a listing of all the products within that specific subcategory. We hope this dynamic hierarchy navigation gives you the flexibility of seeing all the categories/subcategories without clicking the individual pages, but also the opportunity to click on any level of the category/subcategory hierarchy.

Also note the featured SOFTWARE categories (LANGUAGES/IDEs, COMPONENTS, DEVELOPMENT TOOLS, UTILITIES, NETWORKING, ENTERPRISE TOOLS, INTERNET, .NET) at the top of the site within the light-gray tabs. These are "hot-links" to popular SOFTWARE categories that will display featured products and specials for that category. Once this is clicked you can further navigate by clicking on the text subcategory links using the left side navigation described above.

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How do I sort my search results?

The result you receive will be accompanied by a sort options at the header of the Search Results Grid. This will allow you to further refine your results based on manufacturer, Product Name or Price. The Product, Publisher, and Price Headers can be used to sort results. First time you click Product it will sort your results by Product Name displaying products from A to Z, second time you click on the Product Publisher it will sort your results by Product Name displaying products from Z to A. Same thing for Publisher and Price. Although when you sort by Price it will sort it from lowest to highest, and vise versa on the second click.

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How do I filter my search results?

The result you receive will be accompanied by a filter options at the top of the Search Results Page. This will allow you to further refine your results based on Publisher/Manufacturer or Category. The Publishers/ Manufacturers and Categories listed in the dropdown boxes only list the Publishers/Categories for the products that are included in the existing results.

To get back to your original Search Results, just change Publisher and Category to – Show All – and then click Filter Button.

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