Search Tips

Words or groups of words | Requiring/excluding words | Case sensitivity
Special characters | Wildcards | Special functions | Results ranking

Words or groups of words

This is the most simple type of search. Simply enter words or groups of words that describe what you want to search for.

• nutrition, for documents about nutrition
• health factors, for documents containing both words (health and factors).

To search for a specific groups of words and not for the words alone, use quotes.

• "home care", to find documents containing the exact phrase home care.
• "Tony Clement ", to find documents containing the words Tony Clement, together and in this order.

To illustrate this better, the search Tony Clement without quotes will look for documents containing either Tony or Clement or both. The search with quotes will only look for documents containing the whole phrase "Tony Clement ". Quotes are particularly useful when searching for phrases containing special characters like dashes or numbers, for example a telephone number like "1-888-555-1212".

Requiring/excluding words

Often you will know a word that will be guaranteed to appear in a document for which you are searching. If this is the case, you can request that the word appear in all of the results by attaching a "+" to the beginning of the word.

• child youth injury +statistics, to find documents about statistics on childhood injuries
• promotion +"mental health", to find documents about mental health promotion

On the other hand you can quickly reject results by adding a term that appears often in unwanted articles with a "-" before it.

• regulated products -cosmetics, to find documents about regulated products, other than cosmetics.

Case sensitivity

If you search a word in lower case, the engine will retrieve all documents containing this word regardless of its capitalization.

• department finds department, Department, DEPARTMENT, DEpartMeNT, etc.

If you search a word containing capital letters, the search becomes case sensitive and will only retrieve documents that are an exact match.

• Department finds only Department

Special characters

Following the same principle as with the case sensitivity, searching for a word without specifying any accents will find both words without and with accents. This is particularly useful when searching for documents in another language, like French.

• eleve, finds all élevé, élève, etc.
• cote, finds all cote, coté, côte, côté, Côte, Coté, etc.

Specifying accented letters on a word will limit the search to words with the exact same accents.

• élève, finds only élève
• Côte, finds only Côte

Wildcards

You can use the asterisk (*) as a wildcard indicating that you want to find all words containing a match for the specified pattern of letters.

• inter*, finds intern, internet, international, interest, etc.
• inter**t, finds internet, international, interest but not intern

To avoid searches that would be too general, the wildcards must be preceded by at least three letters.

Special functions

The search engine doesn't just search text. Here are all of the other ways you can search our pages:

Results ranking

The search engine will display results according to a score generated according to the following criteria:

• Words provided in the query form.

• Words or groups of words appearing in the document's title.

• Words or groups of words appearing in the document's summary.

• Words or groups of words appearing in the document's keywords.

• Words or groups of words appearing in the first few lines of a document.

• Number of occurences of certain words or groups of words in the query. A word that is more rare will have more influence on the ranking than a very frequent word.

• Words or groups of words appearing in the document. The position occupied by a document containing all the words will be higher that a document containing only one or two of the query words.

• The proximity of the various query words within a document.