The search engine is a state-of-the-art tool that runs in conjunction with a layer of semantic metadata across the content that makes up AccessScience.

When a user searches for information on AccessScience, the search engine looks for matches with the metadata so that it is not relying on matching exact words when they appear in the content but rather on the true meaning of the concepts detailed in the content. These concepts can occur anywhere on the site -- Encyclopedia Articles, Research Updates, Biographies, News, and more. Therefore, users can find all the relevant discussions of the topic they are looking for, even if named differently in different resources.

In the infrequent cases in which a user cannot find the results he or she is looking for using the semantic search engine, he or she can perform a full-text search, accessible via the "Search Options" page, that allows the Boolean connectors "and", "not" and "or", and that searches through each word in the data set. Users can also limit their search to just one or many content types or one or many topics.