Although we've taken every care to simplify the navigation of this website, we accept that you may sometimes not find what you're looking for. Our search engine will then be a valuable aid. It works like this.

Simple queries

To define a query, enter one or more search words separated by spaces in the input field.  When including more than one word, you have two options for telling the search facility how to interpret your query:

• Search for all the words
  Choose this option to find pages that contain all of the words you have entered. Pages that contain only some of the words will not be returned.

• Search for any of the words
  Choose this option to find all pages that contain at least one of the words you have entered. On the results page, the search facility will indicate which words were found on which pages, showing the pages containing the most search words at the top of the list.

Advanced queries

Although the search facility has been carefully designed to return excellent results based on simple queries, it also supports special query syntax to allow advanced users to obtain even better results by using wildcards or full phrases.

Wildcards (full phrases)

To use a wildcard, type an * [asterisk] to take the place of any number of letters at the end of a word. This will ask the search facility to return all pages containing words that start with the letters you specified.

For example, if you are searching for information about "Institutional investment",
but you are not sure how to spell it, then you can type just the parts that
you remember, such as:

• Instit* investment

This query would find references to "Institutional investment". But, because wildcard searches are more general, you may find many pages that are not relevant, such as "institution".
 
Sentence search

Sentence search enables you to make very precise search queries by enclosing full phrases in double quotes.

Example:

By enclosing the phrase "the missing link" in double quotes, you will only find pages that include this precise phrase, not those that happen to have one or more of these words somewhere on the page.

Even if you do not use double quotes, the search facility will still notice when it finds the exact phrase entered into the query. 

Stemming

The search function is able to support stemming, which causes the search facility to find words that are grammatically related to a search word. For example, a search for "link" will also find "linked" and "linking", though pages that include the precise word will rank higher on the results list.

To rank pages by age

If you are looking for information that has been published recently, then you might want to ask the search facility to sort found pages according to their date. We provide three options for ranking by age:

• Relevance:
  The search facility will ignore the date information, but will still display it on the results page.

• Partly by date:
  The search facility will consider the date information when ranking results, but will also consider how closely each page matches your query. Pages that are both new and have a strong match will be ranked higher than pages that just have a strong match.

• New pages first:
  The search function will rank newest pages first, with equally old pages ranked by relevance. Older pages will be ranked lower.