Help for the search engine

Simple Search

Searching individual words

You can enter one or several search terms. When entering more than one term, separate them by blanks.

Entry: school training

The return will show all pages and files which contain "school" as well as "training".

Searching phrases

It is possible to search for phrases, entire sentences or parts of sentences. In this case, enter a phrase and put the entire search term in inverted commas.

Entry: "Funding programmes in education"

Will return all pages which contain exactly this phrase.

Searching in titles only

When you want to include only titles in your search, you can use the keyword "title:". Please note that the search term has to follow the keyword directly and that there is no blank between the colon and the search term.

Entry: title:Funding title:Research

The return will give all pages and files which contain "Funding" as well as "Research" in the title. 

Advanced search

Targeted exclusion of document

In addition to the search functions of the simple search, the advanced search facilitates the targeted exclusion of specific areas and file types.

Example: You want to search only in PDF files.
How-to: Tick the boxes "Press releases" and "Articles" in order to exclude these areas from the search.

Logically linking words (Boolean operators)

The advanced search enables a replacement of AND links by OR links or an individual optimizing of the query by means of Boolean operators (AND / OR / NOT).

Entry: school NOT training
Finds documents which contain the word "school" but not the word "training".

Entry: (school AND training) OR Pisa
Finds documents which contain either "school" and "training" or only the word "Pisa".

Entry: (school AND training) NOT research
Finds documents which contain "school" and "training" but not "research".

Sorting

The results can be sorted by different aspects:
  • Ranking - relevance of search results
  • Title - alphabetical sorting of the title
  • Time - sorting by the date of the last modification or the writing of the article or document

An inverse sorting is also possible.

Date of the last modification

The option "is older than" and "is more recent than" enables a filtering of documents by their last modification date.

Option: "is more recent than " and "3 months"
Finds only documents which were modified no longer than three months ago.

Access and display of search hits

When your search was successful, all hits will be displayed in a list. Each hit can be accessed by clicking on the title. An internal function is used for marking your search words on the hit page. A click on the URL address in the last line of the hit will return the page without marking of the search terms.

A small symbol is displayed before the title if the hit is a PDF document.