About Search help

The Zoom search engine provides a number of advanced search options to help you find exactly what you're looking for on our website. This page offers instruction on how to use these options and reminders on some of the more basic search techniques.

Choosing Search Terms

It is obvious, but worth emphasizing: Use key words that are significant and spelt correctly. Use of similar or related search words can improve the relevance of search results. By default, the search will return pages that include any of your search words, but you do have the option to match all the search words.

Match ANY Search Word (Boolean OR) - Default

Search for pages which contain AT LEAST ONE of the given search terms. The results will be sorted in order of the number of terms matched and the determined relevancy score. Select the match “any search words” radio button on the search form to enable this search option, there is no need to type “OR” between search terms.

Match ALL Search Words (Boolean AND)

Search for pages which contain ALL of the given search terms. The results will be more specific than when matching any word, but still sorted in the same way. Select the match “all search words” radio button on the search form to enable this search option, there is no need to type “AND” between search terms.

Category Searches

You can restrict your searches to a specific site section by choosing from the options in the category drop-down box of the search form.

Capitalization

Searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be interpreted as lower case. For example, searches for Mobile, mobile and MOBILE will all return the same results.

Wildcard Searches

You can expand the number of matches for a particular search term by using wildcard characters to search for variations of or similar words to the search term. An asterisk character (*) in a search term represents any number of characters, while a question mark (?) represents any single character.

This allows you to perform advanced searches such as (blog*) which would return all pages containing words beginning with “blog”. Similarly, (b??g) would return all pages containing four letter words beginning with ‘b’ and ending with ‘g’. Wildcard characters can be used in any position within a search term, for example the term (*lo*) could be used to search for any words containing the letters “lo”.

Exclusion/Negative Searches

To exclude pages containing a specific word from search results, precede the word with a minus sign. There should be a space between any previous word and the minus sign, but no space between the minus sign and the following excluded search word. A search for the term (joe -blog) for example, would return pages containing the word “joe” only if the word “blog” is not somewhere on the same page.

Suppose you wish to find information on all things mobile but not phone related, then you could use the expression (mobile -phones). Note however, that the use of the exclusion operator in conjunction with wildcards (e.g.. mobile -phone*) is not supported.

Exact Phrase Searches

An exact phrase search returns results where the phrase of words is found in the same order as specified in the search expression. For example, an exact phrase search for the words “watch live” would only return results where the phrase “watch live” appears. It would not return pages where the words “watch” and “live” are found separately, or in a different order such as, “live watch”.

To specify an exact phrase search term, you need to enclose the entire phrase within double quotation marks. You can also combine the use of exact phrase searches with normal search terms and wildcard search terms within a single search query (e.g.. “watch live” sport*). Note however, that wildcards within exact phrases (e.g.. “watch li*”) are not supported.

Skip Words

Note that some common or very short words such as “the”, “and”, “or” may be deemed to be skip words and ignored by the search, unless used as part of an exact phrase search. If a skip word has been excluded from the search, this will be indicated by a message displaying details of the omission just before the search results listing on the search page. Skip words are configured by the web site administrator.

Skip Pages

Some areas on our site may be excluded from searching. These may be pages that are restricted, are not content related or would be meaningless to include. For example, the search page itself is not indexed. Skip pages are configured by the web site administrator.