May 2023
- When you enter search terms using the box in the upper right corner of any of the sites listed below, the results from 6 VPR websites are aggregated into a single stream of results pages.
- Searching all the sites listed below is the default behavior. No matter which of the six sites you do the search from, it will return results from all six sites.
- To limit the search to just the site you are on: Do a search, and when you have a results page you will see a checkbox that says "This Site Only". If you tick that checkbox then click search again and it will display only results from the site you are on.
- Search will also look inside PDF files and return the URL for PDF files containing matches to your search term.
A quick guide to the search operators that work in the new search engine.
- The new search engine is case insensitive, which means that it doesn’t matter if you type, for example: “compliance”, “Compliance”, “cOMPLIance” or “COMPLIANCE”. They will all return the same results.
- To do an exact match on a multi-word phrase, put quotes around the entire string. Note that dashes will be considered spaces, so put quotes around terms that are hyphenated. Examples: “allocation rates”, “key person”, “federal terms”, “sponsor-approved”… Leaving off the quotes will find every page that uses one or the other of the terms.
Search Operators and Conventions
There are four search operators you should be aware of.
Wildcard “*” – This works as it does in most search engines. The * may represent any number of characters.
The * can be placed at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the word you are searching.
Examples:
- alloc* finds any word starting with alloc
- *ternal finds internal, external, eternal, fraternal, etc
- exp*n finds expiration, exploration, experimentation, expansion
Single character wildcard “?”
You may have used the % sign for this in other search engines, but this engine uses the “?”. The single character wildcard will find words that have exactly the number of characters in the search string.
Examples:
- alloc??? finds allocate, but NOT allocated, allocation, allocable
- ship???? finds shipment, shipping, but NOT shipped, shipper
Fuzzy search -- search for words that are similar in spelling “~”
This search supports fuzzy searches based on the Levenshtein Distance, or Edit Distance algorithm. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde ~ symbol at the end of a single word term. For example, to search for a term similar in spelling to "intern" use the fuzzy search:
intern~
This will return results containing internal, intel, intent, international, etc.
Boosting search terms (^)
The boost “^” operator can be used to elevate the more relevant term of a two word search in the rankings. Boost values range from 1 to 5, where 5 is the highest boost. Do not put quotes around the two terms. The search will find every page where one of those terms appears, but will list first the pages where the boosted term appears.
If you want the term "export" to be more relevant boost it using the ^ symbol along with the boost factor next to the term. Compare results for these searches.
- export^5 shipping vs export shipping
- fabricated^4 equipment vs fabricated^4 equipment