Help with Searching

Type what you are looking for in the box. There is no need to use any special characters or awkward syntax. Use several words to narrow down your search.

If you want to find pages that contain your words regardless of capital letters, type your words in lower case. If you want to find an exact match, type the words in upper and lower case. The search looks for the root of words, so it treats both the singular and plural form of a noun, or any tense of a regular verb, as the same word.

Click on the find button or press Enter and you will get a list of documents that match your search words, ranked in order of relevance. The search takes the frequency of search words in a document into account, as well as how close the words are to each other.

You can use the previous and next buttons or the row of numbers at the bottom of each page to navigate between the pages of results.

Click on the hyperlink to view that item (on Hantsweb underlined in blue). The thermometers show how likely the document is to match your enquiry.

Fine Tuning

Although you can get excellent results by using search words, more experienced users may value the ability to fine tune searches with the following facilities.

Emphasising a Word

If a word is especially important to you, put a plus sign in front of it; for example:

+pepperoni

This will give the word a very high importance in the search: items containing the word will appear at the top of the list.

Excluding a Word

If you wish to look for items that do not contain a particular word, type the word with a minus sign in front of it; for example:

-anchovies

This means that items containing the word will appear near the bottom of the list.

Searching For Proper Nouns

Proper nouns, such as the names of people or places, should be typed in with a capital letter. For example,

John Baker

This stops the search looking for both singular and plural forms of the words; it also reduces the chances of getting a list of items about bakeries.

Combining Search Tools

You can combine these techniques. For example, if you were interested in finding out about class sizes in the Portsmouth area but not in Southsea, you could enter:

class sizes +Portsmouth -Southsea

This will produce a list of pages containing the words "class" and "sizes", but those containing "Portsmouth" will be pushed towards the the top of list, while those containing "Southsea" will be pushed to the bottom.

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