Our 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 covers nearly 2500 reports and datasets from the economics agencies of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Enter your keywords and phrases in the Search text box. Press the button to process. Select the Title Search box to limit the search to the title. Reports from the Agricultural Marketing Service are not shown unless the "Include AMS in Search" box is selected. Select the Advanced Search link to use the advanced search form. Select the Search Tips link to view addition search tips. You may view all titles from an agency by selecting the agency acronym (i.e. NASS) from the Browse by Agency select list.

• Boolean AND Search--the default search is an "AND" search, so there is no need to add that operator. For example, if you entered cattle grazing in the box, the search engine would look for return links to resources that have both cattle and grazing in the descriptive paragraph, but not to resources that have only grazing or cattle in their descriptions.
• Boolean OR Search--use an uppercase OR between terms to retrieve information that contains either word A or word B (eg: food OR nutrition).
• Phrase Search--search for complete phrases by enclosing them in quotation marks or connecting them with hyphens (eg: “food guide pyramid”).
• Exclude Query Term--place a “-“ sign before a term that you want to exclude from the search results (eg: imports -dairy).

The Advanced Search offers the same functionality as the Basic Search, but it also provides additional options for reducing the total number of search results.

Limit your results with extra search options:

• Return results from a specific USDA agency: ERS, FAS, NASS, WAOB, or AMS.
• Return results where specified keywords and phrases occur in the title, description or keywords, or just in the title of the page..

Choose how your search results display:

• Sort the results by relevance or by date.

Command line searching allows you to target a quick search to a specific title , one of the five agencies, or file status. Title:poultry, for example, will search for the term poultry in titles only. Agency:ers will look for files produced by the Economic Research Services. status:current will look only for current files (other status choices are archive, bulletin, and scanonly).

The search box is intended to help you to select appropriate reports and datasets for further investigation. It does not search the contents of the databases, just a short descriptive paragraph of each. Therefore, you have to use broad concepts when you use this search window (e.g. use cattle instead of Hereford, or even nuts instead of almonds.)
after you have identified a resource, you will have to connect to it to conduct your search in detail.