Search Help and Tips
Match ANY search word (Boolean OR)
Search for pages which contain AT LEAST ONE of the given search terms. The
results will be sorted in order of the number of terms matched, and the
determined relevancy score. Click the “match any search word” radio button
to enable this search option.
Match ALL search word (Boolean AND)
Search for pages which contain ALL of the given search terms. The results
will be sorted in order of the number of terms matched, and the determined
relevancy score. Click the “match all search word” radio button to enable
this search option.
Wildcard searches
You can use wildcard characters ‘*’ and ‘?’ in your search terms to search
for multiple words and return larger set of results. An asterisk character
(‘*’) in a search term represents any number of characters, while a question
mark (‘?’) represents any single character.
This allows you to perform advanced searches such as “zoom*” which would return all pages containing words beginning with “zoom”. Similarly, “z??m” would return all pages containing four letter words beginning with ‘z’ and ending with ‘m’. Also, “*car*” would be a search for any words containing the word “car".
Exact phrase searches
An exact phrase search returns results where the phrase of words are found,
in the same order that they are specified. For example, an exact phrase
search for the words “green tea” would only return results where the phrase
‘green tea’ appears. It would not return pages where the words ‘green’ and
‘tea’ are found separately, or in a different order such as, ‘tea green’.
To specify an exact phrase search term, you need to enclose the words that
form the phrase using double quotation marks. You can also combine the use
of exact phrase searches with normal search terms and wildcard search terms
within a single search query (eg. “green tea” japan*). Note however, that
wildcards within exact phrases (eg. “green te*”) are not supported.
Exclusion/negative searches
You can precede a search term with a hyphen character to exclude that search
term from being included in your search results. For example, a search for
“cat -dog” would return all pages containing the word “cat” but not the word
“dog”.
Skip words
Note that some common words such as “the”, “and”, “or” may be
deemed to be skip words and ignored by the search. This is configured by the web site administrator.
Category searches
You can restrict your searches to a specific category by choosing a defined
category from the drop-down box. This is configured by the web site
administrator.
