Basic Searching
To perform a basic search on UKSearch.com, use the search box on the homepage to enter a word or words relevant to the item or subject you are looking for and click Search. The more specific you can be, the more relevant the results. UKSearch.com will take care of synonyms, plurals and verbs (see 'Word conversion in search expressions' below).
A great starting point for broad searches is our directory. From there you can pick a category that's closest to what you're looking for.
The most effective way of searching, is to select a few 'keywords', words that are most relevant to your search e.g. - 'National Trust'.
Understanding your search results
Search Engines work by matching your search with pages that seem relevant. UKSearch.com decides what's relevant by checking how often and where the word occurs. Links to and from the page are also taken into account.
Each result will show the page title, taken from the page's title tag in its HTML, and a relevant extract of the page. Occurrences of the keywords in your search will be displayed in bold in the results you see. This should help you select those which are most useful to you.
Relevant results from our directory will automatically be included in your search. If a result is from the directory, you will see the heading:
- Similar Sites
underneath the result. Clicking on this will take you to the directory category this result came from, so that you can browse similar sites.
Advanced Searching allows you to control some of the rules UKSearch.com uses to decide which results to show for your search. If you do not alter these the default settings are used.
Word conversion in search expressions
UKSearch.com operates on the basis that searches using slightly different language inflections should return the same results.
For example, if you are looking for pages about 'networked computers', UKSearch.com makes the assumption that you will also be interested in pages containing phrases such as 'network computer'.
The words in your search are converted back to word roots, so that plurals, verb tenses, adverbs, direct synonyms and so on, are 'normalised' back to root forms.
The following words and phrases give the same search results:
- "Easter vacations", "Easter vacation", "Easter holiday" and "Easter holidays"
- "foster children", "foster child", "fostered children"
- "choreographing ballet", "choreographed ballets", "choreograph ballet" etc
- "decentralized government", "decentralised governments" etc
- "Christmas cards", "Xmas card" etc
UKSearch.com does however discriminate between nouns and verbs so that "choreographer" will return different results to "choreograph" as one would expect from the usage.
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