Simply type one or more search words into the search box and click on the ‘Go’ button.

You will then see a list of web pages related to your search words, with the best match listed first.

Choosing search words

Choosing the best search words is the key to finding the information you are looking for.

Start with the obvious – if you’re looking for information on nutrition, try nutrition.

Capitalisation

Searches are NOT case sensitive. You will get the same search results whether you type in lowercase, uppercase or mixed-case.

Multiple search words

Normally, we only return pages that include all of your search words. The order in which the words are typed will not affect the search results. To restrict a search further, just include more words. For example, to find out about the benefits of Alliance membership, just type membership benefits.

Optional and ignored words

We usually only return pages that use all of the words you search for. However, very common words, such as ‘the’, ‘and’, or ‘a’, are usually ignored during searches because they don’t convey much information compared to your other search words.

Generally, excluding these common words means that we can return better search results. However, if one of these words is important to your search, you can precede it with a plus sign ‘+’ to indicate that you want it to appear in every search result. So, for example, a search for Music +and Dance will return only results that include the word ‘and’.

Exact Matches

Sometimes you might only want results that include an exact phrase. In this case, simply put double quotation marks either side of your search words.

The types of search are particularly effective if you’re searching for proper names (“Steve Alexander”), or a quote (“Champagne ideas need more than beer money”).

Negative words

If your search word has a very broad meaning you can focus your search by putting a minus sign (“−”) in front of words you want to exclude e.g. record keeping −accident. would find pages related to keeping records about anything but accidents. If you want to avoid a word, but not exclude it entirely, then you can use a tilde (‘~’) instead of a minus. It is usually better to enter words relating to what you are looking for, rather than words you aren’t.

Wildcard searches (‘words starting with’)

You can also end a search word with an asterisk (‘*’) to mean ‘starting with’. This can be useful when you want to search for both the singular and plural version of a word, e.g. nurser* would find pages mentioning either ‘nursery’ or ‘nurseries’.

Restricted results

If you are logged in to the website, then the search function will take advantage of knowing which part of the country you are in to return additional, local results where applicable (e.g. from a webpage maintained by your local Alliance subcommittee). Sometimes you might have access to areas of the website that are not available to the general public - e.g. students have access to the Learning Zone. You must be logged in for these areas to be searched.