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Help Pages

Performing a basic search
Search results
Advanced search
Noise Words

Performing a basic search

To find a document or page contained within this site, type the word or words that you are looking for into the search box in the top right hand corner of the page. Click the ‘Go’ button to the right of the box to search.

Tips for basic searching

  • Basic search will search all page content and the text of documents
  • Assumes ‘AND’ between the words
  • You can use a combination of AND and OR and NOT to limit your search.
  • Is not case sensitive, e.g. searching for modification will find modification and Modification
  • will match partial strings - e.g. mod* will find modify and modification
  • Search looks for common word variations i.e. searching for ‘modifications’ also finds ‘modification’
  • Search for an exact phase by enclosing the words in quotes, e.g. “BSC Signatories” will locate documents where these words appear next to each other in the specified sequence

If search does not find any results, it will look for pages that contain any of the words you typed rather than all of them. So, a search for 'modification report' can return results that contain either the word 'modification’' or 'report', not necessarily both.

For more information on forming a query, visit the Webinator Search Help page.

Search results

By default, results are returned in order of relevance. The closest match to your search query will appear at the top of the list.

If you cannot find what you are looking for, try an advanced search by selecting a content category and re-entering your keywords. Factors affecting the ranking order can be controlled in the Advanced Search interface.

If Webinator is unable to locate a document that matches an exact proximity control it will automatically attempt to locate answers with relevancy ranking. The bar-graph display (Search Results Ranking Icon ) will be shown any time rank proximity (see Advanced Search below) was used to perform the search.

For more information on interpreting search results, visit the Webinator Search Help page.

Advanced Search

Use advanced search when basic search returns too many results or does not find what you are looking for.

In addition to looking for the words you enter, advanced search allows you to limit the results by specifying the area of the site you want to search within, i.e. Modifications or Consultations, or confine the search to documents only, i.e. excluding pages of the site. The default selection is ‘Everything’. Furthermore, you can narrow down your search results by selecting a section in the dropdown (by default it searches in All Sections). Moreover, you can define what type of content you want to search, i.e. Documents Only, Web Pages Only, or both.

The advanced search interface (as shown below) allows you to accurately define your search. For specific help, follow the links listed under the Search Help heading. However, some tips for efficient searching are listed below.

Advanced Search Engine Interface

Please Note:

The best search options are usually obtained by setting the Proximity button to ‘page’ and the Word Form to ‘Any’.

Hints for efficient searching

Miscellaneous:

  • the search engine is case insensitive
  • * (asterisk) may be used as a wild card character
  • to find phrases enclose the query in doubles quotes
  • joining words with a hyphen forces word order
  • using a minus sign before a word excludes documents with that word (no space after minus sign)
  • using a plus sign means the returned documents must contain that word (no space after plus sign)
  • this site uses English (not American) spelling

Proximity:

  • 1 word - Locates all terms with one word adjacency without regard to order
  • line - All query terms must occur on the same line
  • sentence - Query items should all reside within the same sentence
  • paragraph - Within the same paragraph or text block
  • page - All items must occur within same HTML document
  • rank - Finds the best possible match(s) for the query terms

Word Form:

  • Exact match- allows only exact matches
  • Plural and possessive – ending s, es, ‘s
  • Any word forms – as many word forms as can be derived will be located

Noise words

Noise words are words that are very common yet have very little meaning. Words like 'a', 'an', 'the', 'to', 'so', 'with', etc. are found in almost all documents but provide very little information about the actual meaning of the document. Therefore, there is very little value to be gained from knowing that a document contains any of them.

The search facility will automatically identify the important words and phrases within your query and remove the “noise words”.

Example: Overview of the Balancing and Settlement Code (BSC) Arrangements

The search will check: “Overview” AND “Balancing” AND “Settlement Code (BSC) Arrangements”

Further Help information can be found on the Webinator Search Help page.

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