Search tips

• By default the search engine tries to locate pages which have exact matches for all of the words entered in your search query.
• If that fails, it then tries to locate pages which contain any words in your search query.
• In short, the more descriptive words you use, the more relevant your results will be.

• Think how the page you are looking for will be written. A search engine is not a human, it is a program that matches the words you give to pages on the web. Use the words that are most likely to appear on the page. For example, instead of saying 'register', say 'register for courses'.
• Choose descriptive words. The more descriptive the word is the more likely you are to get relevant results. Words like 'courses','registration','food', won’t usuablly yield relevant results. Instead, try phrases like 'geography courses' or 'campus food locations'.
• Avoid stop words.Words like 'a', 'the', 'for' bring in a lot of irrelevant results and should be avoided.

Generally, the basic search guidelines should suffice but sometimes, you might want to do a more advanced and powerful search. In the examples below, the text within the [] are the search terms you would use.

• Quotations
  • To match an exact phrase, use double quotes around the phrase

    Putting double quotes around a set of words, tells the search engine to look for those exact words in that exact order without any change.

    Example: ["what's cooking on campus"]

  • To match a single word in a phrase, use double quotes around that word

    Putting double quotes around a single word, tells the search engine to find that exact word without any change and to ignore synonyms.

    Example: ["bibliocafe" hours].

• Search within a specific website

  You can specify that your search results must come from a given website by using the modifier site:site url

  Example: [music books site:library.uvic.ca]

• Excluding specific terms

  Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space.

  Example: [cafeteria hours –calendar]

• * wildcard

  The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells the search engine to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches.

  Example: [uvic * gift *]

• OR operator

  If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that it should be an upper-case 'OR').

  Example: [swimming pool hours mckinnon OR ian stewart]

• Search for a specific document type

  If you’re looking to find results that are of a specific type, you can use the modifier filetype:file type

  Example: [timetable builder tutorial filetype:pdf]