Advanced Search Tips

• Use All the Words to return results that have ALL your keywords within a document. The words need not be together (i.e. if you want an article that has the words “pension”, “insurance” and “Ontario” to appear, using “All the Words” will ensure those three words appear at least once in the document.
• Use Any of the Words to return documents where at least one of your keywords appear (i.e. if you type in “Pensions Ontario Insurance” into the search box, documents containing at least ONE of those words will appear in your results).
• Use Exact Phrase when you want the words to appear in the exact order you type them (i.e. if you type in the term “Financial Services Tribunal” it will only return results that have those three words together in that exact order).
• Select document format if you want the search engine to return results from ONLY one type of document (i.e. HTML, PDF, MS-Word, etc.).
• Search for Word Variations is used if you want the search engine to try different permutations of your phrase (i.e. if you typed in the word “run” and the check box is clicked, it will also look for  “ran, running, runs, etc.”).  This feature is always turned on, unless you remove the checkmark from its checkbox.
• Include and Exclude searches allow you to refine your search further by allowing you to specify WHERE your search word should come up.  You have the option of searching within the text/body of a document, the title, the URL, or a combination of these three.
• Sort Options is used to determine the order in which your results will be displayed.  They can either be displayed by Relevance¸ Date (ascending: oldest to newest, or descending: newest to oldest), or Size (ascending: smallest to largest file size or descending: largest to smallest file size).
• You can Refine Results further, by including a last updated range (i.e. updated in the last month, six months, nine months, etc.) or by file size (i.e. larger than 1MB).
• Type of Summary is used to display the text that appears underneath the title of your results.  Clicking on Find Phrase on Page, puts your keyword in context by showing you some of the wording before and after your search term.  By clicking on Page Summary, the first few lines of the document will be displayed, regardless of whether or not your keyword is within those sentences.

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