How to refine your search

The more words you give, the more results you'll get. Try following these examples:

1. Search by typing words and phrases

landscape digital maps for gis in large scale

The search will find pages containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so the most relevant pages are presented first. Pages containing more of the words you gave will be ranked high, while pages containing just one of your search terms will be ranked low.

2. Identify phrases with quotation marks and separate them with commas

landscape "digital maps", for gis, in "large scale"

A phrase is entered using double quotation marks, and only matches those words which appear adjacent to each other. Separate multiple phrases or proper names with a comma.

3. Use UPPER case when you know that your result must be in upper case

OS MasterMap Topography Layer, large-scale mapping

Search terms in lower case will match words in any case. Use mixed UPPER and lower case when you want an exact case match.

4. Refining your search

It's easy to refine a query to get precisely the results you want. Try these effective methods:

5. Identify a phrase

The before query is ambiguous and brought up a large number of results with every page containing os, select, site, centred and/or maps.
Identifying "OS Select" and "site centred maps" as separate phrases focuses the search to deliver fewer, more relevant results. This is the most powerful query refinement technique.

6. Add another meaningful word or a phrase

Adding -news (minus news) focuses the query further by eliminating news releases about the product, OS Select.

The search brings up a small number of results, also including an alternative product, the site-centred OS Sitemap^TM. You'll get less matches but with better relevance ranking.

7. Capitalize when appropriate

Our search engine is powerful enough to find results in the first instance, but with appropriate capitalization, the results become more relevant and less ambiguous.

8. Specify what should or shouldn't be returned in results using + and -

James alone gives quite a number of results. Adding the plus sign to include Brayshaw reduced the results but made it more relevant, though most of these are news releases. So we use the reject operator (the minus sign) to eliminate news. This now gives only the quality results.

9. Use a field specifier

If you are looking for a particular page that will include particular keywords in the title, use the title: field specifier to search for them in the title of the page.

10. Try the Advanced search

When you’re looking for something specific, try using Advanced search to narrow down the results and find the exact page you want, more quickly.