Search Professional Learning

Search Rules

This search engine helps you find documents on this website. If you really want to search the entire World Wide Web, we recommend Yahoo and Google for a start.

Here's how it works: you tell this local search service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages in our Professional Learning index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

How To Use:

1. Select whether you want to require any or all of your terms to be present.
2. Type your keywords in the search box.
3. Press the Search button to start your search.

Here's an example:

1. Select All terms in the index from the drop-down options list.
2. Type bulletin registration in the search box.
3. Press the Search button or press the Enter key.

The Results page will show our pages that contain both of these terms.

Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.

More Basics - An Overview

What is an Index?

Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages and discussion group pages from around the world. The 'index' becomes larger every day as people send us the addresses for new Web pages. We also have technology that crawls the Web looking for links to new pages. When you use our search service, you search the entire collection using keywords or phrases.

What is a Word?

When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.

What is a Phrase?

You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.

Example #1: To find information about the new teacher orientation program type "new teacher orientation" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.

Simple Tips for More Exact Searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Fulton" will match the lowercase "fulton" and uppercase "FULTON" and the mixed case "Fulton".

By default, all searches are accent insensitive as well, but administrators can change this setting. Accent sensitivity relates to Latin characters like õ.

Including or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find pages containing but without raisins, try "recipe cookie +oatmeal -raisin".

Expand your search using wildcards (*):

By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.

Example: Try learn* to find learn, learning and learner.

Fancy Features for Typical Searches

You can search more than just text. Here are all of the other ways you can search on the net:

title:text
Finds pages that contain the specified word or phrase in the page title (which appears in the title bar of most browsers). The search title:bulletin will find the page with Bulletin in the title (remember these searches are case insensiitive).