Search assistance

Refining your search of salford.gov.uk

It is easy to search our site. Just type in a few words or phrases.

But if you get too many results or not the right kind of results you’ll need to refine your search and you can do this by trying to use discriminating terms that are likely to be found only in the web pages or documents you are looking for. The golden rule is to remember that the more specific your search criteria, the better the returned results will be.

Here are some examples of how you can refine your search of this site:

Search by typing words and phrases

Example: Pentium computer with 8x CD-ROM for sale

Our search will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, with results ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don’t worry about missing a document because it does not have one of the words in your search the search engine returns relevant results even if they do not contain all query terms.

Identify phrases with quotation marks, separate with commas

Example: Pentium computer with "8x CD-ROM", "for sale"

If you want to search on a particular phrase, enter it using double quotation marks. The search will only match those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma as noted in this example.

Use UPPER case to indicate exact match

Example: Steve Jobs, NeXT

If you search for a word or phrase in lowercase only, the search engine will match words in any case (upper, lower, mixed case). Otherwise, an exact match for your search criteria is returned.

For example, searching for ‘next’ will find matches for Next, next, and NeXT, whereas a search for ‘NeXT’ will only match NeXT.

This page was last updated on 3 October 2009