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Search Tips

In an effort to continue providing reliable search results, the Canada Site has implemented a new search engine.

The tips in this section will help you get the best search results possible and help you use the tool to its fullest potential. Select one of the following topics for addition information:

Default Search Behaviour

When entering terms separated by spaces, the documents returned will match all the terms in the query. The more terms entered, the more precise the results will be. Note that all searches are case insensitive.

Search will match exact terms and stemmed variations of the terms. For example for the term walk, search will match the terms walk, walking, and walked.

Examples

  • Query: festival Vancouver summer
    • Returns documents containing the terms festival and Vancouver, and summer in varying case.
  • Query: taxing
    • Returns documents containing the terms taxing, tax, and taxes in varying case.

Exact Phrase Matching

Surround the term or phrase in quotes to find documents matching an exact term or phrase. Using quotes also prevents stemming of search terms. Note that all searches are case insensitive.

Examples

  • Query: "registered savings plan"
    • Returns documents containing the phrase registered savings plan in varying case.
  • Query: "taxing"
    • Returns documents containing the terms taxing in varying case.

Wildcards

A wildcard is a character used to substitute a range of possible characters. For best results, apply quotes around the terms to avoid stemmed variations in the search results. The following wildcards are valid:

? - Matches one character.
* - Matches zero, one or more characters.

Examples

  • Query: "p?rt"
    • Possible matches are port, part, etc. in varying case.
  • Query: "dep*t"
    • Possible matches include depot, deport, dept, depart, department, etc. in varying case.

Boolean Search

Boolean search allows the use of logical expressions to find documents. The following Boolean operators are available:

AND - Returns documents containing both operands.
OR - Returns documents containing at least one of the operands.
NOT - Returns documents where the operand is not found. This operator applies only to the right operand.
XOR - Returns documents containing only one of the operands. If a document contains both terms, then it is not included in the results.

Examples

  • Query: maple AND hockey
    • Returns documents containing maple and hockey
  • Query: federal OR provincial
    • Returns documents containing federal, provincial, or both.
  • Query: NOT pension
    • Returns documents that do not contain pension.
  • Query: department XOR agency
    • Returns documents containing department or agency, but not both.

Proximity Search

Proximity search finds documents where terms are found within a maximum distance from one another. Adjacent terms are considered to be 1 term apart. If no distance is specified, the distance defaults to 6.

NEARn - Returns documents where the right term is within n words of the left term.

Examples

  • Query: youth NEAR career
    • A possible result would be a document containing the phrase "The Career Focus program offers youth a range of work experiences." Note that in this document the terms are within 4 words apart.
  • Query: daily NEAR1 news
    • Returns documents containing the expression daily news. The query could also return news daily.

Field Search

Many documents contain additional information relating to its content. This is referred to as metadata and is captured in fields. A user can perform queries against specific fields to return relevant results. The following syntax is used to search fields:

field:expression - Returns documents where field matches expression.

The search supports four field searches:

Creator - The institution or organization entered in the "creator" or "dc.creator" metadata field of the document.
Description - The summary text entered in the "description" or "dc.description" metadata field of the document.
Subject - The subject entered in the "subject" or "dc.subject" metadata field of the document.
Title - The title in the "title" or "dc.title" metadata field of the document.

Any terms included after the colon will be matched against the specified field. Once the search encounters AND, OR, NOT, or XOR in a query, it will match the remaining expression against the entire document.

Examples

  • Query: title:budget
    • Returns documents whose "title" or "dc.title" metadata field contains budget, in varying case.
  • Query: title:travel AND subject:tourism
    • Returns documents whose "title" or "dc.title" metadata field contains travel and whose "subject" or "dc.subject" field contains tourism, in varying case.
  • Query: title:"Immigration AND Passport"
    • Returns documents whose "title" or "dc.title" metadata field contains the phrase Immigration and Passport.
  • Query: creator:"Parks Canada" AND shipwreck
    • Returns documents whose "creator" or "dc.creator" metadata field contains the phrase Parks Canada and the document contains shipwreck, in varying case.

URL Search

Use the URL search to find documents from a particular website. Use the URL operator to match patterns in a document's URL. The following syntax is used:

URL:expression - Returns documents whose URL matches the expression.

Any terms included after the colon will be matched against the specified field. Once the search encounters AND, OR, NOT, or XOR in a query, it will match the remaining expression against the document.

Examples

  • Query: URL:canada.gc.ca
    • Returns documents containing the expression canada.gc.ca in the URL.
  • Query: URL:canada
    • Returns documents containing canada in the URL, for example,
      http://canada.gc.ca/azind/azindex-eng.html.

Advanced Search

There are two search interfaces: Basic and Advanced. This allows for more possibilities with search queries. The Advanced interface provides a number of features not available in the Basic interface such as language, date range, file format and number of results.

Language

By default, search will search for documents in the same language as the search page. Use the Language drop-down to search for documents in English only, French only, or both English and French. Note that by default stemming is turned on in the language of the search page, when searching in both languages place the search terms in quotes to turn off the stemming feature.

Date Range

Searches can be done for documents that were last modified on a specific date or within a range of dates. To specify a range of dates, enter the dates in the From date field (start date) and the To date field (end date). To find a document that was last modified on a specific date, enter the same date in both the From date and the To date fields. The format of the date is always YYYY-MM-DD (four-digit year, two-digit month two-digit day).

File Format

To search for documents in specific formats such as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF, use the File format drop-down to narrow the search.

Number of Results

By default, search will return 10 documents per results page. Use the Results drop-down box to view more than 10 results on a page.

Date Modified: 2010-05-26

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