The search allows only keywords to be entered which will be matched against the contents of all the pages on Information Devon. By default, Committee Minutes and Reports are excluded from the search.
You can choose to run your search every day and have the results sent by e-mail. Requests are processed for 31days before being automatically removed. Use the option at the end of the Simple or Advanced search pages to set-up this facility.
The index, on which your search is applied, is updated once a day.
The search is not case sensitive (eg. looking for beer will find beer and Beer).
It will match partial strings (e.g. exm* will find Exminster and Exmouth).
N.B. Watch out for words that you want which may have various endings, eg. if you want pages relating to tourists then searching for tourists would not find tourist or tourism - you should search for touris* instead.
You can use AND and OR and NOT to limit your search. However AND is assumed between words. These work from left to right along the search.
For example, the search string
primary OR special AND school* OR headmaster*
will be interpreted as
((primary OR special) AND school*) OR headmaster*
You can search for a phrase by enclosing the words in quotation marks eg "Topsham Middle School" This will locate documents where these words appear next to each other in the specified sequence.
Your first two search terms are used to rank the results. Pages with the words in their title are listed first, followed by pages with the words near the top of the page. After these come pages where the words exist somewhere in their text.
Currently all two-letter and longer words are indexed. However it is fairly pointless to search on very common words, eg. Devon, since they are going to be on practically every page. You can use one of the Advanced Search options to limit your search to certain areas of Information Devon. For example, if you are searching for information on a particular town, then you may wish to avoid all the statistics about it, and thus select the Exclude Facts & Figures option.
Post Codes are indexed, so you can search on these. However you will need to split up the two halves (eg. EX2 and 4QJ) and these will be searched for separately. Thus you may get pages which have these codes anywhere on them (eg. a page with EX2 4QC and EX1 4QJ).
Numbers are currently indexed, but pound signs and commas will have been removed. A decimal point or a solidus (/) will cause the number to be split up so, at present, dates (embedded within text on a page) cannot be searched for.
HTML (web page formatting) commands are not indexed.