Help with Searching
This application enables you to search the Valuation Office Agency's Internet site for a specific piece of information. Key in the word or phrase you are interested in, and then click search. You can select your preferences for limiting the number of successful hits returned, the number of hits on the results page, and whether you wish to search for a specific word or phrase.

Beginning a Search

The Search button starts things going, and the Clear button resets the form including all the default preferences.

Searches produce a list of documents that contain the word or phrase, no matter where they appear in the text. This list gives the rules for formulating queries:

• Queries are not case-sensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.
• You can search for any word except for common or "noise" words (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search.
• Common or "noise" words are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. If you searched for “Word for Windows”, the results could give you “Word for Windows” and “Word and Windows”, because for is a noise word.
• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
  To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (“).
• To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, “World-Wide Web or ““Web””” searches for World-Wide Web or “Web”.
• You can insert Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) and the proximity operator (NEAR) to specify additional search information.
• The wildcard character (*) can match words with a given prefix. The query esc* matches the terms “ESC,” “escape,” and so on.
  

Boolean and Proximity Operators

Boolean and proximity operators can create a more precise query.

• You can add parentheses to nest expressions within a query. The expressions in parentheses are evaluated before the rest of the query.
• Use double quotes (") to indicate that a Boolean or NEAR operator keyword should be ignored in your query. For example, "Abbott and Costello" will match pages with the phrase, not pages that match the Boolean expression. In addition to being an operator, the word and is a noise word in English.
• The NEAR operator is similar to the AND operator in that NEAR returns a match if both words being searched for are in the same page. However, the NEAR operator differs from AND because the rank assigned by NEAR depends on the proximity of words. That is, the rank of a page with the searched-for words closer together is greater than or equal to the rank of a page where the words are farther apart. If the searched-for words are more than 50 words apart, they are not considered near enough, and the page is assigned a rank of zero.
• The NOT operator can be used only after an AND operator in content queries; it can be used only to exclude pages that match a previous content restriction. For property value queries, the NOT operator can be used apart from the AND operator.
• The AND operator has a higher precedence than OR. For example, the first three queries are equal, but the fourth is not:a AND b OR c
  c OR a AND b
  c OR (a AND b)
  (c OR a) AND b

Note   The NEAR operator can be applied only to words or phrases.

Wildcards

Wildcard operators help you find pages containing words similar to a given word.

Search Results

Site Search Results Page gives you details of the documents that matched your query, and gives you links to each document.

	1	9698 page 2
		http://www.voa.gov.uk/publications/charters/9698/9698_2.html size 4,933 bytes - 04/04/2002 08:32:44 GMT

You will have set the maximum number of documents to be returned and the number of documents presented per results page when you began your search. An example of a document retrieved and presented by Site Search is reproduced above.   Site Search will give each document a ranking, based on how closely it matches the query you gave.  The documents are presented in descending order of ranking, so the most appropriate documents will be at the top of the retrieved list.  In addition a ranking is presented by way of red spots next to the document order number.  The more spots there are, the more relevant the document is.  The maximum number of spots is ten.  In the example shown the document has nine spots indicating that it was very likely to encompass the required piece of information.

The full address of the document is presented as a link to enable you to study the document as it is found in the Instructions.  The title of the document is also a link to it.  The size of the document file, together with the date and time it was most recently updated is also shown.

Summary

The Summary option gives you the opportunity to see where the word or phrase given appears in the document retrieved.  Sticking with the example given above, an extract from a summary page is reproduced below.  To give you an indication of context, the words either side of the specified word or phrase are also shown in the Summary page.  

... APPENDIX 22

APPENDIX 22
CGT - Indexation Allowance 1. Disposals between 6.4.82 and 5.4.85 (1.4.82 and 31.3.85 for companies)

The allowance under ss.86 and 87 FA 1982 was ...

Full

The Full option enables you to see the whole document and exactly where the word or phrase appears within it.  Within the Full page you can hop to each instance of the word or phrase within the retrieved document.  An extract from a Full page is reproduced below.

APPENDIX 22

APPENDIX 22
CGT - << Indexation>>  Allowance 1. Disposals between 6.4.82 and 5.4.85 (1.4.82 and 31.3.85 for companies)

The allowance under ss.86 and 87 FA 1982 was calculated by applying an << indexation>>  factor to the actual acquisition cost and any other items of allowable expenditure. The factor was calculated by using the formula:-

Expenditure RD - RI



RI