How to Search

Full Text Search Bar

This search is a full text search. It finds every word of every text document, producing a broad search and returning a high number of documents.

Logical Operators

The full text search bar contains three logical operators you can use to improve your search results ("Scope" drop-down menu). These logical operators control how your search terms are used in order to broaden your search by retrieving a greater number of documents or to narrow your search by retrieving a smaller number of more-relevant documents.

The following logical operators can be used for any kind of search:

Logical Operator	Search Results	Number of Documents Returned
"All of these words"	Returns only documents that have occurrences of every word in your search query.	Returns fewer documents than "Any of these words" but more than "Look for this phrase".
"Any of these words"	Returns documents that have occurrences of at least one of the words in your search query.	Produces the broadest search and returns the highest number of documents.
"Look for this phrase"	Returns only documents that have occurrences of your search term in the exact order as entered.	Produces the narrowest search and returns the fewest documents.

Examples:
For the search query "Toronto economic development" with each logical operator:

Logical Operator	Search Type	Matching documents must contain:
"All of these words"	Narrow	Every search term, anywhere in document ie. "Toronto" and "economic" and "development"
"Any of these words"	Broad	One or more of the search terms ie. "Toronto" or "economic" or "development"
"Look for this phrase"	Narrowest	The exact phrase "Toronto economic development" in the order as entered

Truncation and Wildcard Characters

Truncation and wildcard characters add flexibility to your searches. The search engine is designed to recognize the asterisk ("*") and question mark ("?") characters as wildcard indicators. You can use these special characters to broaden your searches using either the multiple or single character wildcard.

Wildcards are useful for searching truncation and word stems (e.g. "scho*" to retrieve "school", "schools", "scholarships", etc.) or variant spellings (e.g. "organi?ation" to retrieve "organization" or "organisation").

Usage:

1. Multiple character wildcard
   Substitute "*" for a sequence of zero or more characters.
   i.e. to search for schools and scholarships, use "scho*"
2. Single character wildcard
   Substitute "?" for a single wildcard character
   i.e. "organi?ation" will match different spellings: "organization" or "organisation"
3. Wildcards in multiple terms
   Wildcards can be used in multiple search terms
   i.e. Canad* Gov*
4. Wildcards in front of characters string
   Wildcards can also be used in front of characters string
   i.e., *national will match different terms such as National, International
   Using this search method may not perform as well as if you were searching with a character string followed by a wildcard character.

"Topics of Interest" and "Geographic Regions"

You can use the "Topics of Interest" and "Geographic Regions" to limit your search to one or more topics or regions. A selection of topics and/or geographic regions can be used in combination with the "full text search bar", or on their own.

Here is how you can use a combination of topics and regions when performing a search:

1. Multiple Topics of Interest
   e.g. "Economic Development" and "Employment" and "Health"
   The search results will return all the documents that are related to ("Economic Development" OR "Employment" OR "Health")
2. Multiple Geographic Regions
   e.g. "Alberta" and "Prince Edward Island"
   The search results will return all the documents that are related to ("Alberta" OR "Prince Edward Island")
3. Combination of Topics of Interest and Geographic Regions
   e.g. "Economic Development" and "Employment" for the Topics of Interest and "Alberta" and "Prince Edward Island" for the Geographic Regions
   The search results will return all the documents that are related to (("Economic Development" OR "Employment") AND ("Alberta" OR "Prince Edward Island"))
4. Combination of Topics of Interest, Geographic Regions and the Full Text Search Bar
   e.g. "Economic Development" for the Topic of Interest, "Alberta" for the Geographic Region and "Tourism" entered in the full text search bar
   The search results will return all the documents that are related to ("Economic Development" AND "Alberta" AND "Tourism")

Search Results Icons

= Web page outside the ACP
This icon is displayed beside search results that are from links external to the Aboriginal Canada Portal (ACP) Web site. The content of those Web pages is not controlled by the ACP team.

= ACP Web page
This icon is displayed beside search results that are from the ACP Web pages. The content of those pages is managed by the ACP team.

= ACP Community Web page
This icon is displayed beside search results that are from the ACP's Aboriginal Communities Tool. This tool contains contact information, geographic maps, statistical profiles and connectivity profiles on all the First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities in Canada.