Tips for advanced searching

• Searching from this page will only return resources that match all of the selected criteria.
• All of the text searches support logical operators.
  • Use an uppercase OR between terms to retrieve pages that include either term.
  • Use an uppercase NOT before a term to exclude it from the search.
  • If more than one search term is entered with out any logical operators the AND operator is entered automatically to restrict the search to only those resource that match all of the terms entered.
  • Use ( AND ) to group terms and operators, e.g. "Bedfordshire AND NOT (county OR council)" will retrieve resources which include the term "Bedfordshire" but not "county" or "council".
• All of the text searches support phrases, stemming and word variations.
  • To search for phrases use quotes around the words, only resources which include the exact phrase will be returned.
  • Use the % character either side of the term for word stemming.
    Examples:-
     %source will match text which ends with "source" (e.g. resource).
     source% will match text which starts with "source" (e.g. sources).
     %source% will match any text which includes "source" (e.g. resource, sources and resources).
  • Use the * character at the end of a term to search for word variations, e.g. "dry*" searches for all resources containing words of the form dry: dried, drying, and so on.
• You can use the expiry dates to search for archived resources. If the expiry dates are not set only current resources will be returned.
• You can limit the resource type to one or more particular subtypes by checking the appropriate checkboxes.
• Searching from the menu bar will look for the search word in any of the following fields: title, description, body, url, url description, rights, spatial coverage, creator, publisher and contributor.