Evergreen tries to approach search from the perspective of a major search engine: the user should simply be able to enter the terms they are looking for as a general keyword search, and Evergreen should return results that are most relevant given those terms. For example, you do not need to enter author’s last name first, nor do you need to enter an exact title or subject heading. Evergreen is also forgiving about plurals and alternate verb endings, so if you enter dogs, Evergreen will also find items with dog.

The search engine has no stop words (terms are ignored by the search engine): a title search for to be or not to be (in any order) yields a list of titles with those words.