At the moment this searches all text content on the website, PDFs that have been OCRd, the periodcials hosted here, and the transcripts of manuscript material where available. Most items on the archive have not yet been OCRd and so are not searchable here.
The syntax is 'Google-like', so can use quoted queries for phrase searches, e.g. "Plymouth Brethren"
There is an inbuilt 'fuziness' in the search algorithm, so will return words that are similar to the one searched for, as well as the word itself. This is useful as the OCRing is not always 100pc accurate.