You can make your search more relevant if you understand how
searches are conducted and how you can modify your query to change
the way the search is carried out.
Basic search principles
- Searches are not case sensitive, so whether you
use capitals or not the results will be the same.
- The results that appear first are pages where
the words you specify appear many times.
- When you enter search words, the system finds
all words that start with that word. So for example, if you search
for test, then you will get results for pages containing tests,
tester, and so on.
Literal phrases
You can put entire phrases in quotes to find pages where that
phrase appears as specified. So searching for "west
sussex" will return pages containing that exact phrase
(ignoring capitalisation of course). You won't get pages containing
"...west of sussex....".
Proximity search
When words or literal phrases (search terms for short) are
separated by space, the system returns pages where those terms
occur within 100 words of each other, and the top results are those
where the terms are close together, or where they appear many times
on the page.
Boolean operators
You can combine terms using logical operators; linking terms
with or returns pages where either of the terms
appear. So a search for school or education will
return all pages where the word school appears and also pages where
the word education appears.
Note that it will also return pages with schools, schooling,
educational...
When you link terms with and or
+, the search returns pages where all the terms
appear, regardless of where on the page they appear. So a search
for school + education returns only pages where
both those words appear.
Combining different operators
All the above search modifiers can be combined. Here are some
examples:
- "structure plan" chichester - finds pages
containing the phrase "structure plan" where the word
chichester appears less than 100 words away;
- "minerals plan" or "waste plan" and structure
- finds pages containing either of the phrases
"minerals plan" or "waste plan" as long as they also
contain structure (or structures, structured).