Search Information
Below you will find information on how to carry out effective searches on the website.
This search engine provides a number of advanced search options to help you find exactly what you're looking for on your website.
Match ANY search words
If you select this option on the search page, the search engine will look for pages that contain AT LEAST ONE of the words you entered in the search. In the results, the pages that the search engine finds with more of your search words will be put at the top of the results.
Match ALL search word
If you select this option on the search page, the search engine will look for pages that contain ALL of the words you entered. The results will be ordered according to the number of times it finds your words on a page.
Wildcard searches
You can use wildcard characters '*' and '?' in your search terms. An asterisk character ('*') in a search term represents any number of characters, while a question mark ('?') represents any single character.
Using wildcards in your searches is a great way to find pages on a range of topics or if you don't know the exact spelling of a word, you can jut type in the bits you know and use wildcards to let the search engine fill in the gaps.
This allows you to perform advanced searches such as "care*" which would return all pages containing words beginning with "care" Therefore, you might see results for page containing the words "careers", "career", "carer", "carefully" etc.
Similarly, "c??e" would return all pages containing four letter words beginning with 'c' and ending with 'e'. Therefore words such as "care","core","cope" etc would be found.
By putting a '*' at the beginning and end of a word, for example "*car*", would be a search for any words containing the word "car".
Exact phrase searches
An exact phrase search returns results where only pages containing exactly what you have written appear. For example, an exact phrase search for the words "job hunting" would only return results where the phrase 'job hunting' appears. It would not return pages where the words 'job' and 'hunting' are found separately, or in a different order such as, 'hunting job'.
To specify an exact phrase search term, you need to enclose the words that form the phrase using double quotation marks. E.g. "job hunting"
You can also combine the use of exact phrase searches with normal search terms and wildcard search terms within a single search query (eg. "job hunting" ports*). Note however, that wildcards within exact phrases (eg. "job hunt*") are not supported.
Exclusion/negative searches
If you put a hyphen character "-" before a word in your search, any pages that the search finds containing that word will not be included in the results. For example, a search for "career -nurse" would return all pages containing the word "career" but not the word "nurse".
Category searches
You can restrict your searches to a specific category by choosing a defined category from the drop-down box. By default, only web pages from the site will be searched, however, you can also search through the PDF files on the site, or even webpages and PDF files all at the same time.
