The search engine provides a number of advanced search options to help you find exactly what you're looking for on our website. This page offers instruction on how to use these options and reminders on some of the more basic search techniques.
Please use keywords that are significant. Use of similar or related search words can improve the relevance of search results. By default, the search will return pages that include any of your search words, but you do have the option to match all the search words.
Below are guidelines and techniques for best search results.
Please click on the desired link/topic to show the answer.
- Match ANY Search Word - Default
Search for pages which contain AT LEAST ONE of the given search terms. The results will be sorted in order of the number of terms matched and the determined relevancy score. Select the “match any search word” radio button on the search form to enable this search option, there is no need to type “OR” between search terms.
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- Match ALL Search Words
Search for pages which contain ALL of the given search terms. The results will be more specific than when matching any word, but still sorted in the same way. Select the “match all search word” radio button on the search form to enable this search option, there is no need to type “AND” between search terms.
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- Category Searches
You can restrict your searches to a specific site section by choosing from the options in the category drop-down box of the search form.
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- Capitalisation
Searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be interpreted as lower case.
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- Wildcard Searches
You can expand the number of matches for a particular search term by using wildcard characters to search for variations of or similar words to the search term. An asterisk character (*) in a search term represents any number of characters, while a question mark (?) represents any single character.
This allows you to perform advanced searches such as (pharma*) which would return all pages containing words beginning with “pharma”. Similarly, (p??a) would return all pages containing four letter words beginning with ‘p’ and ending with ‘a’. Wildcard characters can be used in any position within a search term, for example the term (*gp*) could be used to search for any words containing the letters “gp”.
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- Exclusion/Negative Searches
To exclude pages containing a specific word from search results, precede the word with a minus sign. There should be a space between any previous word and the minus sign, but no space between the minus sign and the following excluded search word. A search for the term (gprd -statin) for example, would return pages containing the word “gprd” only if the word “statin” is not somewhere on the same page.
Note however, that the use of the exclusion operator in conjunction with wildcards (e.g.. gprd -statin*) is not supported.
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- Exact Phrase Searches
An exact phrase search returns results where the phrase of words is found in the same order as specified in the search expression. For example, an exact phrase search for the words “GPRD GOLD” would only return results where the phrase “GPRD GOLD” appears. It would not return pages where the words “GPRD” and “GPRD GOLD” are found separately, or in a different order such as, “GOLD GPRD”.
To specify an exact phrase search term, you need to enclose the entire phrase within double quotation marks. You can also combine the use of exact phrase searches with normal search terms and wildcard search terms within a single search query (e.g.. “GPRD GOLD” pharma*). Note however, that wildcards within exact phrases (e.g.. “GPRD GOL*”) are not supported.
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- Skip Words
Note that some common or very short words such as “the”, “and”, “or” may be deemed to be skip words and ignored by the search, unless used as part of an exact phrase search. If a skip word has been excluded from the search, this will be indicated by a message displaying details of the omission just before the search results listing on the search page. Skip words are configured by the web site administrator.
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- Skip Pages
Some areas on our site may be excluded from searching. These may be pages that are restricted, are not content related or would be meaningless to include. For example, the search page itself is not indexed. Skip pages are configured by the web site administrator.
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