Read our Search Tips to get the most relevant results from our search engine.
Use quotation marks
Use quotation marks to find words which must appear adjacent to each other in a phrase, for example, "British Drilling Association" Otherwise, the search results will include the word British, Drilling, and Association, but not necessarily in that order. If you do not use quotation marks the words may appear anywhere, and in any order, within the document.
Use appropriate capitalization
Capitalize proper nouns. Lowercase words will match any case. For example, typing "search" will return all documents containing the words "search", "Search", and "SEARCH". However, typing "Search" will only return pages including the word "Search".
Use plus (+) or minus (-)
Use a plus sign when your search term or phrase must appear in the search results. Use a minus sign to indicate undesirable term(s). The plus sign tells the search engine that a certain word or phrase is required in the search results, and a minus sign indicates that a word or phrase must be absent in the search results.
Leave no spaces between the plus or minus sign and the term.
Check spelling
Make sure your search terms are spelled correctly. The search engine will attempt to find words that sound similar to your search terms, but it is always best to try to spell the search terms correctly.
Use multiple words
Use multiple words when performing your search. The search results will return more refined results from several words than from a single word. Keep in mind, however, that relevant results are returned even if they don't contain all query terms.
Use similar words
The more similar words you use in a search, the more relevant results you will get back.
Use field searches
Field searches allow you to create specific searches for words that appear in a specific part of a document. A field search can be performed on body text (body:), title text (title:), alt text (alt:), meta description (desc:), meta key words (keys:) or URL (url:). The field name should be in lowercase and immediately followed by a colon. There should be no spaces between the colon and the search term.
| Example: |
|
title:Drilling Contractors
desc:"drilling and boring contractors"
keys:drilling coring
body:"Raeburn Drilling"
alt:"Derrick"
url:aboutus
|
Use wildcards
Wildcard searches can expand the number of matches for a particular request. The * character is used as the wildcard character.
For instance, searching for wh* will find the words what, why, when, whether, and any other word that starts with wh.
Searching for *her* will find the words here, whether, together, gathering, and any other word that contains her anywhere in the word. Wildcards may be combined with the standard plus (+) and minus (-) modifiers, quotes for phrases, as well as the field search specifiers.
+wh* -se*ch will find all pages which have a word that starts with wh and which does not contain a word that starts with se and ends with ch.
"wh* are" will find the phrases where are, what are, why are, etc.
