Simple /advanced search  | Full-text search  | Searching by date  | Narrowing your search  | Useful tips  | Sorting your results  | The ICRC site, or sites  | Google search

Use Simple Search to search through all the text of every page on the current site. See Full-text search below for more details.

To use Simple Search, type something in the box that appears at the top-right corner of every page of the site and press Enter (or click OK).

Use Advanced Search to restrict your search by date, country, type of document, etc.

To use Advanced Search, click the Advanced Search link that appears in the top right-hand corner of every page of the site.

You can search for:
- a single word;
- an expression (i.e., text plus wildcards – see below);
- a number of words or expressions linked together by the operators and, or or and not.

Examples:

Type this	...to find this
rwanda	All documents containing the word Rwanda.
international humanitarian law	All documents containing the phrase international humanitarian law. Unlike Google and similar search engines, you do not need to enclose phrases in quotes.
afghanistan and anti-personnel mines	All documents containing both Afghanistan and anti-personnel mines
central america or latin america	All documents containing Central America and all documents containing Latin America, or both.
guinea and not bissau	All documents containing Guinea, except for those that also contain Bissau.

Capitalization, accents and hyphens
The search is not case-sensitive, i.e. you can use capitals or small letters. The search ignores accents, so you can type them or not, as you prefer.

Example: Côte d’Ivoire and cote d’ivoire give the same results.

However, the search engine does take apostrophes into account: cote divoire will not give the same result as cote d’ivoire.

Hyphens also count, so health-care, health care and healthcare are not the same: to find all three spellings, type health-care or health care or healthcare.

Exact match
This feature appears on the screen but has not yet been implemented. In effect, it is always “on”, even if you uncheck the box. If you wish to search for both the singular and the plural of a word, for instance, use or.

Example: mine or mines

Wildcards
You can use ? and * to search for similar words.

The character ? represents a single character, while * represents zero or more characters.

Examples:

Type this	...to find this
ira?	All documents containing Iraq or Iran, but not Iraqi or Iranian.
ira*	All documents containing Iraq or Iran, plus those containing Iraqi, Iranian, etc.
arm*	All documents containing arm, arms, armed, etc., plus those containing Armenia, Armenian, etc.
shatt ?l-arab	All documents containing shatt el-arab, plus those containing shatt al-arab.
bag*dad	All documents containing bagdad or baghdad

Quotation marks
While you do not need quotation marks to search for phrases (“international humanitarian law” gives the same result as international humanitarian law), you do need them if your search expression contains the following words:

- and
- or
- and not
- near
- sentence
- paragraph
- field

Examples:

- field officer produces an error message, whereas “field officer" finds documents that mention ICRC field officers
- women and war finds all documents containing the word women and the word war, whereas "women and war" finds only those documents that mention the topic “women and war”.

You can search for all documents issued before or after a specific date, or between two dates. The dates are inclusive.

Example:

Typing 31-12-2000 in the between field and 01-06-2001 in the and field restricts your search to documents issued on 31 December 2000 and 1 June 2001, and all dates in between.

If you want to restrict your search to one day, type the same date in the between and and fields.

You can restrict your search to a geographical area, one or more countries/regions, one or more subjects and/or one document type by selecting options from the drop-down lists in the corresponding fields.

You can also restrict your search to particular media (photos, videos, PDFs, etc.) using the Contains field.

If you do not specify any restrictions, the search engine will look in all documents.

To find all documents dealing with relations between Iran and Iraq:

- In the uppermost Country/region field, choose Iran.
- In the second Country/region field, choose Iraq.
- Change the OR next to Iran to AND.
- Specify dates if required.
- Click the radio button "by date".
- Click search or press Enter.

Sorting your results

By default, Advance Search sorts your results by relevance, displaying the most relevant document first. To sort your results by date, most recent first, click the radio button by date.

The ICRC site, or sites

The ICRC operates five separate websites:

Family links (for people trying to trace missing relatives) (www.icrc.org/familylinks)

Each site has its own search engine. You are currently searching the main site, in English.

The only way to search all ICRC sites simultaneously is to use Google or a similar public search engine (see below).

Google search

You can also use Google to search the ICRC sites.
- Google allows you to search all ICRC sites simultaneously.
- Google does not allow you to restrict your search by date, country, subject, etc.

To search the ICRC sites using Google:

- Go to www.google.com (or the Google site you usually use).
- On the Google search page, click the Advanced Search link.
- In the field return results from the site or domain, type icrc.org.
- Type the text you want to look for with all of the words, with the exact phrase or with at least one of the words, as appropriate.
- Click Google Search or press Enter.

You can obtain the same result by going to the Google home page and typing site:icrc.org after the text you want to look for.

Example: “nuclear weapons” site:icrc.org

Other search engines, such as Yahoo, have similar options.