Advanced search

Netco's search engine is now available for your site in version 2.0.

Search for:
Match:	Any word All words Exact phrase
Dated:
		From:	,
		To:	,
Within:
Show:	results
Sort by:
Simple search

Using search effectively

Search examines text in all pages, including publications. It doesn't examine PDF or Word files but it will find the introductory text and link text so it should find the relevant key words.

Search re-indexes the site each evening so each day's changes will be available in search results after 6pm that day.

Search has two options: simple and advanced.

Simple search
Simple works on a word or phrase. Entering "Dunedin" will find occurrences of that word throughout the site. "Auckland traffic congestion" will find each occurrence of "Auckland" or "traffic" or "congestion"

Advanced search
Advanced offers search results based on every word you enter, some of the words you enter or the exact phrase. It may also restrict hits by time period, number of results per page and rank hits by date or relevance:

Single word or phrase:
Enter a single word or phrase and click the search button. This is identical to using the simple search with the advantage that you may also filter results using the functions described above.

All words:
Enter a group of words. Government Transport Sector Changes, for example.

Select from the "Match" instruction beneath the search box.

Any Word: finds Government or Transport or Sector or Changes on any page.
All words: finds Government and Transport and Sector and Changes on any page.
Exact phrase finds "Government Transport Sector Changes" only where it exists as a phrase with all words in identical order.

All searches are case insensitive so Dunedin is treated identically to dunedin.

To reduce the number of hits and make the search more specific, use the date modifiers.

The "within" criterion means:

Anywhere - the default, searches all elements
Title - searches on page title, the blue bar atop your browser (above the File Edit View etc menu bar)
Body - all text in the visible web page
Alternate text - the ALT tags on images (hover your mouse pointer over an image and you see the ALT text).
URL - text in the hyperlinks

Select the number of hits (results) you want per page. It offers 5, 10, 25, 50 or 100 results per viewing page.

Sorting by score and date

Advanced search offers the options of relevance or file creation date by which to sort results.

In other words, to list files by most recent to oldest, use the date condition.

Relevance is scored by precedence. Finding the word:or phrase in:

URL = 3 hit points
Page Title = 2 hit points
ALT = 2 hit points
body text = 1 hit point

The small blue image to the left of each hit listed on the advanced search results page increases in height depending on the relevance score. Hits are ordered most relevant to least relevant.