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Search this site

Just type your search term in the "Look for" box then click on Go. If this produces too many results, you can reduce them by repeating the search, and using some of the other options: Match, Dated, Look in, Show, and/or Sort By.

Help on searching

To get more specific search results, try using the following tips:

Use synonyms

Example: big large enormous
will find pages containing one of more of those words. ("or" is implied between the words you specify).

Use quotation marks to find phrases

Example: "consensus group"
will find pages with the phrase consensus group, but not consensus of the group.
Clicking on "Exact phrase" is the same as putting quote marks around it. Please note that the quotation marks are not part of the search itself, but an instruction to the search engine.

Use plus (+) or minus (-)

Example: +group consensus discussion focus
will find pages with the word "group" and one or more of the other words. (The other words can be anywhere in the page.)
Example: python -monty
will find pages containing the word "python" but not the word "monty"
There must be no space between the + and the word: e.g. +group, not + group Clicking on "All words" is the same as putting + before each word.

Use appropriate capitalization

Example: Reading
will find pages containing the word "Reading" (with a capital R) but not "reading" (with a small r). 
To find a word regardless of capitalization, begin it with the lower case letter - e.g. reading will find both "reading" and "Reading".

Use wildcards

Example: participa*
will find pages with any of the words: participant participants participate participated participates participating participative participatory .... (The asterisk replaces any number of letters or digits at the end of a word.)

Don't use partial words, except with wildcards

Example: participa
will not find "participate" etc. (Use a wildcard instead - as above.)

Spelling

If all else fails, recheck your spelling! However the Atomz search engine is quite tolerant of spelng mistakes. Search for group, misspell it as groop, and with the sound-alike option turned on, it will still find "group". If this tolerance produces a lot of words that aren't relevant to your search, do the search again with sound-alike matching turned off.

Stopwords

Don't bother searching on these 15 very common words: the search engine ignores them, to speed up searches and reduce clutter in the results. You didn't really want to find all the pages containing the word "and" - did you? The 15 stopwords are
a an and are by for from is of on this that the was with
However, if you search for an exact phrase, any stopwords in the phrase will not be ignored.

Synonym problems? Try the site map insteadIf your search was unsuccessful, maybe you didn't type in the right synonyms. (If you search for "large" you won't find pages that mention only "big". Search engines are not very bright: they search for exactly what you type in. Sometimes a site map is more helpful than a search.

Interpreting results

The Atomz search results open in a new window. Pages with the highest score are shown first. High scores are caused by your search word/s occurring many times on the page, and near the beginning.

Click on the page title to go straight to that page. You may have to scroll down the page to see the word/s you have searched for.

Searching within a page

You can search inside a page by using the little-known Find command in the Edit menu in Internet Explorer, Netscape, or whatever browser software you are using.

But you need to know that this type of search works differently from a search engine. Search engines ignore punctuation and line endings, but the Edit > Find command is sensitive to punctuation. If you can't find what you're looking for, and you know it's there somewhere, the problem may be invisible punctuation, or perhaps you're inadvertently not searching the whole page, but only from your starting point to the end.

Searching the entire Web

If you want to search the entire Worldwide Web, we recommend Google (www.google.com) and Exalead. Google indexes more pages in total, but Exalead, based in France, seems to have a better coverage of pages in European languages. If all else fails, try Clusty (clusty.com): our favourite metasearch engine - it searches other search engines, and groups the results according to meaning.

There are new developments in online search and we'll sum the main ones, key players and user implications shortly, by end of October 2011. 

If a Google or Exalead search turns up too many pages, you could try a website directory. These select sites that a real live person has decided are among the best of their kind. The most comprehensive directories are currently the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org (also known as the Google Directory) and Yahoo (www.yahoo.com). For material of the kind you see on this website, the Intute Social Sciences directory (www.intute.ac.uk) is excellent.