ANU Search – Help & Tips

Entering search terms

• Enter multiple words to find pages with all those words. For example, entering student accommodation finds pages containing both 'student' and 'accommodation'.

• Use quotes around search terms to find exact phrases. For example, entering employment conditions finds pages containing 'employment conditions' but not 'conditions of employment'.

• Use a hyphen to exclude terms. For example, entering Parking -Permit finds all pages containing 'Parking' that do not contain 'Permit'.

• Use an asterisk at the start and/or end of a term to search for variants. For example, entering *john* finds pages with words starting or ending in john (such as Johnson or Micklejohn) but entering Fred* only finds words beginning with Fred (such as Freddie, Frederick or Fredrickson).

Narrowing your search

• Use classes to search for page properties such as author and title (also known as Metadata), or use the Advanced Search to automatically specify the classes for you. Not all ANU pages contain such properties.

  t: = title, a: = author, c: = description, s: = subject or keywords

  For example, entering t:Security finds all pages with 'Security' in the title.

Featured pages

• Featured Pages are returned at the top of the results page when people enter particular terms. These pages are highlighted as the most likely page you are looking for. For example, if you search for Style the page on ANU Branding is returned as a featured page. For more information, see Requesting a featured page.

Help for ANU webmasters

• Improving your ANU Search result ranking
• Requesting a featured page
• Putting an ANU Search box on your site
• Using ANU Search logs
• Controlling who can index your site

• Webmasters can seek further help by logging a DOI Help Desk job under the topic ANU Websites > Other.

About ANU Search

• ANU search uses version 5 of FunnelBack. More detailed help information is available from the FunnelBack Search facility.

Try it yourself

Choose a web page collection: