Quotations marks
Why we use them: Quotation marks help separate keywords and phrases. When you use quotation marks Quick search knows to look for items specifically that pertain to the exact phrase you input, such as "Abortion rights."
Stop words
What are they? Stop words are common words that search programs ignore because they aren't helpful in matching documents to users' search queries, according to Introduction to Information Retrieval.
Which words are they? Joseph Deodato, a Rutgers Discovery Services Librarian, cites words such as of, the, an, and a as stop words. Try to avoid using stop words while searching.
Booleans
What are they? Booleans are words that allow you to combine phrases when searching such as NOT, OR, and AND.
How do I use it? Use these terms to string together or compare phrases. If I search, "abortion rights," OR "birth control," entries about abortion rights or birth control will come up versus if I search "abortion rights," AND "birth control," entries containing both subjects will be retrieved. Remember that booleans must be typed in all caps to work. Check out more about booleans in this NYPL blog post.
Asterisk
How is it used in search? Asterisks are used as wildcards in search engines. They allow for variation based on the term you inputted. For instance, if I typed abort* results could include aborts, abortion, abortions, abortive, etc. To find out more check out this Q&A.
Nesting
What is it? Nesting is when parentheses are used to create more complex searches. You can use nesting along with booleans to create search strings such as (abortion OR abortion rights) AND (pro-choice NOT pro-life). To find out more about nesting check out this LibGuide.

To learn even more about the ins and outs of Quick Search check out this video by Joseph Deodato.

Items