All Thurrock Council web pages have a search engine box in the top-right corner.
The search engine is a computer program which reads all the text of every web page published on this site. By typing a word into the search engine box, and either clicking on the adjacent 'Search' button, or pressing <ENTER> on your keyboard (or equivalent), you can find every occurrence of that word within the Thurrock Council web site.
The council's search engine is supplied and maintained by Open Objects Software Ltd. The information below describes how to get the most from this utility.
It's easy to use Thurrock Council Search. Just type your query terms in the box provided and then 'Search'. You can use single terms or type in a whole sentence or phrase but try to use discriminating terms that are likely to be within the text of the documents you are searching for.
Thurrock Council Search will find documents containing as many of these words and phrases as possible, ranked so that the documents most relevant to your query are presented first. Don't worry about missing a document because it doesn't have one of the terms in your query because Council Search returns relevant results even if they don't contain all query terms.
Once you have submitted your query Council Search will return a page of results. You will see the title of the document (if it has one) and a brief summary that is likely to indicate what the document is about. The title is a link direct to the actual document.
Additional information about each document is also displayed on the results page. The percentage relevance of each document to the query you entered, the last modified date of the document and the documents location.
By default, results are sorted by their relevance to the specified query. Using the "sort by date" link displays the results sorted by their last modified date. The "sort by relevance" link will reverse this process.
To see more results in the available screen space, use the "hide summaries" link. To reverse the process, use the "show summaries" link.
You refine your search results by following the "Advanced Search" link. This take you to page of options for searching for words or phrases in the main body of the document, or just the title, or from hidden keywords.
You can also limit your search to documents modified within specified date ranges, and you can choose how may results to show on each page.
© 2002 Open Objects Software Ltd.