The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (link) is a useful resource but I realized recently that I was not using it correctly. The searches I did on it seemed to produce different results to other users, so I knew I was doing something wrong. I was wondering if someone could provide an overview of the basics of searching for terms on that site - I am not experienced searching corpora even in English, so it can be even more confusing doing it in Japanese.
Very simple explanations and examples would be greatly appreciated.