Search help

Using the basic search facility

To search for pages on a particular topic simply enter appropriate words or phrases into the search box at the top right hand of any of the pages.  Clicking on the search button or hitting return on the keyboard will take you to the search results page.  If no keywords are entered or no pages are found to match your query the result page will be empty and the page will say "the search returned no items."

The number of results found will appear underneath the page search box. You will also be able to see if multiple pages of results have been returned by looking at the bottom of the page, e.g. Page 1 of 12.

Choosing keywords

Use the most relevant and obvious words first - don’t  generalise.

When using a phrase, putting it in quotation marks may give better results e.g. "Botanic Gardens" rather than Botanic Gardens. The search engine will look for this exact phrase, rather than the individual words botanic or gardens.

Be specific with your choice of keywords. For example, choose "primary schools" rather than schools or education.

If no results are displayed then try a more general search. For example, if you search for alsations and no results are displayed, then try using the term dogs.

The search assigns importance based on the position of the word with the keywords i.e. searching on

Glasgow City Council

would return different results if the words were re-ordered as

City Council Glasgow

In the first case the word Glasgow is given priority whereas in the second the word City is prioritised.

Understanding the results

The results are displayed in order of relevance. To access any page from the list of results, click on the title of the page - which appears in the blue bar.

Some results will take you directly to documents which have been created in Portable Document Format (PDF) or Rich Text Format (RTF). These documents have a small icon beside the title and will open in a new browser window.

To view any PDF document you will require the Adobe Acrobat reader which can be downloaded for free from the Adobe Web site.

Capitalization

Searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be treated the same.

Wildcards

If you add an * to the end of your search item, the search engine will look for anything beginning with those letters. For example, garden* will look for pages containing the words garden and bring back results for gardening, gardener, gardeners as well as garden.