To use the search enter your query terms in the search box and click the search button on the right hand-side. You can use single terms or type in a whole sentence or phrase but try to use terms that are likely to be within the text of the documents you are searching for.
The search engine will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are shown first.
You can make your query more specific by clicking on the radio buttons below the search box; Any Words, All Words or Exact phrase. If you are looking for an exact phrase then type the query exactly as it would appear in the document and click the Exact Phrase radio button.
You can click the 'Find in Title only' check box to restrict your search to only find documents that have your query terms in the document title.
Once you have submitted your query, the search will return a page of results. You will see the title of the document and a brief summary that is likely to indicate what the document is about. Click the title to go to the actual document.
Additional information about each document is also displayed on the results page, including:
If your search has yielded lots of results, they will be divided into several pages. You will see 10 results on each page. Use the Previous or Next links to navigate through the results, or jump to the page you want by clicking on the page number.
For a more powerful search, use Advanced Search.
You can make your search even more precise by using the options available in the Advanced Search. Enter your search terms in the appropriate box(es), bearing in mind the following:
Searching for meals on wheels in "Include this phrase" will produce considerably fewer hits than using the same term in "May contain the words" since in the latter case only one of the words needs to be present in the documents presented in the hit list.
The search can also be narrowed by using the "Section of the site" drop-down. The content of the site is arranged in a number of broad sections: "your council", "health and caring", "learning", etc. Selecting one of these will limit the search to that section and thus reduce the number of hits obtained.
The A-Z lists services provided by Essex County Council and clicking on one of the terms listed here will execute a search on that term which looks for each individual word and only returns documents containing all of these.
