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You are here: Home > Help > Full Text Search
About
How to search
· Language
· Words
Technical information
· Harvest and index
· Language
· Ranking
· Words
Environment Canada's full text search engine (Search)
helps you find information on Environment Canada's web site, the
Green Lane TM. Type words or phrases in the search box to tell the
search engine what you are looking for. The search engine looks through
the index to identify web pages that relate to your choices, and responds
by giving you a list of all the web pages that include your search words.
Environment Canada's index includes web sites from the department's
Regions, and Programs and Services.
When you do a "full text" search of the department's web
sites, the search engine looks for terms that are contained somewhere
in the page, whether the words are visible in the page's content
or stored "invisibly" in the code of the page. Search results
are ranked according to the number of times the word appears in the document.
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Any language
- Retrieves the greatest number of records (documents that include
the words being searched, whether the content of the page is written
in English or French). Not all pages are identified in the index as
being written in either English or French.
Searching by a specific language will return a much smaller list of
results. (See technical information about searching
by language…)
English
- Retrieves documents that are identified by the index as being written
in English.
French
- Retrieves documents that are identified by the index as being written
in French.
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All words
- Retrieves documents that contain every word entered in the search
box. Words will not necessarily be found together as a phrase, but
all of the words will appear somewhere in the document. "All
words" has been set as the default search method so that a more
precise set of records will be retrieved (i.e. a search on water pollution
will return pages that contain "water" and "pollution"
but not pages that only have "pollution" with no reference
to "water"). For searches where documents contain either
one term or the other (but not necessarily both), use the "any
word" search feature. (See technical information
about searching by word…)
Any word
- Retrieves documents that contain at least one of the words entered
in the search. This is a good search to use when you are uncertain
about what terms are likely to appear in a document. For instance,
use "any word" if you want to retrieve documents on "endangered
species" but are not sure which words are likely to be used on
pages dealing with this topic. You could search for species wildlife
animal risk endangered threaten - once you find out which words tend
to appear on the pages you are looking for, you may want to narrow
your search by using the more precise terms in your search and selecting
"all words" or "exact phrase."
Exact phrase
- Retrieves documents that contain words exactly as they are entered
in the search. Use this type of search if you want to retrieve pages
that contain the phrase "air pollution" rather than pages
that simply contain both "air" and "pollution."
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The search engine selects results from an index of Environment Canada's
web sites. A harvest of the sites is conducted regularly to keep the index
up-to-date.
- The language of a page is identified by looking at the address of the
web page (URL may contain _e or _f) or by the content in the language
meta tags (<meta name="dc.language" scheme= "ISO639-2"
content="eng"> or <meta name="dc.language" scheme="ISO639-2"
content="fre">).
- Results appear in order of relevancy and date modified. The number of
times the search words appear in the document increases its relevancy;
documents modified most recently also appear higher in the results listings.
- Whether "any word," "all words," or "exact phrase"
is selected, the words entered in the search box will appear somewhere
in the pages retrieved. Words are either visible (in the body text, site
navigation, etc.) or invisible (in the metadata - title, keywords, subject,
description, creator, etc. - or in other information found in the code
of the web page, which people do not normally see when viewing the page).
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