Search Tips
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This page is provided in order to assist you to find the information you are looking for. Although some content is still under development, you should be able to find most of what you are looking fairly easily using one or other of the methods described below. If you are having problems, try an alternative method. If even that fails, please Contact Us and let us know the problem you are having.
Please note that Devonline undertakes its searches only across its Partner or associated councils sites, and that these searches therefore do not extend across the whole of the world wide web.
Search tips are provided under the following headings:
How can you find the information you are looking for?
The main ways to seek out information are:
Search
The search facility allows you to enter a single word to represent what you are looking for but will provide better results if you put in a group of words or a phrase related to your query. This may give a large selection of related topics for you to choose from, or will provide one or more options for you to narrow your search. The pages that the portal thinks are most relevant to you are displayed in order of appropriateness.
A-Z
This is an alphabetically organised list of services provided by the Partners and their associated councils. You can use this facility if there is a particular service or area of information you are looking for (e.g. Abandoned Vehicles), and go straight to it on the A to Z. If you prefer you can tailor results to a specific location or you can look county-wide. Results will then be provided containing information relevant to your chosen subject and location irrespective of which Partner site it comes from. If more than one site has relevant information you will be able to select the one you wish to look at. How to tailor results by location is shown below under Advanced Search.
Advanced Search
As well as entering words into the search text box it is also possible to refine your search by widening or narrowing its focus. On the Select Location page, a number of drop-down lists are provided where you can choose to focus your search.
Using the top selector (District / County) you can choose to conduct your search across any one particular authority within the Devon Partnership or search county-wide.This can be effected either by entering a full Devon postcode and clicking the adjacent Go button, or by choosing the location or coverage from the first drop-down list. If you choose Devon County Council, this will cover all of Devon except the two unitary authorities of Plymouth and Torbay.
On this page there is also an image map which allows you to make a similar selection to that provided by this District / County drop-down list.
Using the second drop-down list you can choose Dartmoor National Park by checking the box next to it. You will then be invited to select either one authority that overlaps with it, or all three.
The bottom drop-down list on the page (Town / Parish) contains the first Town and Parish Councils that are taking part in a pilot exercise to provide a consistent set of community information for people who are in their area. This works in the same way as the other drop-down lists. By selecting one of the towns or parishes, all search and A-Z results will be relevant to that location.
Site Map
The site map is a high level view of the structure of the Devon Portal. It shows the main subject areas of content that are provided directly through Devonline. Each of the subject areas shown are clickable links to the appropriate page.
Apart from the main search facilities, in these early stages of the evolution of the portal this content is focused primarily on Environmental Health. More directly provided content will become available over time.
Getting Better Results
Will using just one word give me good results?
Using one word in the Search facility will certainly give you results but these will probably not be as well targeted as if you had provided more specific information. Every additional word that refines what you are looking for will help to give precision to the results, and hopefully reduce the amount of time subsequently spent selecting from them.
Where you are searching for information about something whose description has more than one word (such as council tax), search results will be very much improved by placing inverted commas around the term: i.e. “council tax” so that the search facility does not seek to present information about “council” and “tax” as separate criteria. Adding a District or town name after the subject will have the same effect as choosing it from the Select Location page, and also help to narrow down your search.
Is there a way to reduce the number of results?
Apart from entering very specific words for your search, and selecting by location, there are 3 different search options offered to you once you have been presented with your first set of search results.
These options are:
Search any words
The first set of results presented to you will be based on this the default search option, and will be the broadest possible set of results. “Search any words” will find content that is relevant to every one of the individual words or terms used in your search criteria, independently of each other.
For example if your search words were: district councillors west devon you will be presented back with results from any pages across the Devon Partnership relevant to the term district, plus those relevant to councillors, plus those to west, plus those to devon – without attempting to associate any of the words together.
You are likely to get a large number of results. There may be situations where searching this way is best for you, but for much of the time you may prefer to search more narrowly.
Search all words
This option allows you to search for information that is relevant to all the individual words or terms (grouped words within inverted commas e.g. “council tax”) you have used. Using the same example as for the “Search any words” option, if your search words were: district councillors west devon you will be presented back with results from any pages across the Devon Partnership relevant to every one of the words used.
If a page did not contain references to councillors, it would not be returned. Putting inverted commas around “west devon” would make the results more specific than having the words separately.
Search complete phrase
This option allows you to search for content in which an exact phrase occurs. This may be particularly useful for getting very quickly to material that, for example, you may be familiar with but can’t remember where to find it. Such a phrase might be something like: abnormal loads over the Tamar Bridge. Only pages with that exact phrase would be returned in your search results. In most cases the number of returns will be small.
Because it is a specific phrase that the search engine looks for, there is no need to surround it with inverted commas.
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