Also note that the results for each certificate will tell you in which Section(s) and Category that particular award can be found. If you navigate to that area you will find more of the same types of awards. The idea is to help you find exactly what you're looking for as quickly as possible.
Now on to the search.
We provide two methods of searching that are vastly different in the results they produce. So let's cover both since you may want switch back and forth occasionally, depending upon how much you want to narrow your search.
Normal Search
Normal searches use what is known as an OR operand. What this means in plain English is that if you were to search for "blue achievement" while looking for a blue colored Achievement Award your query is actually going to turn into "blue OR achievement".What this means in practice is that your search will return any pre-made certificate templates that match on either the word blue or the word achievement. So the more words you put in your Normal Searches, the more choices you'll end up with. But they may not all necessarily be exactly what you're looking for.
For the record, when using a Normal Search it is usually best not to use something very generic like the words award or certificate. These very generic words will match many, many certificates on some level since most contain one or the other in their description.
Advanced Search
The Advanced search utilizes what is known as Boolean search. In a nutshell, boolean searching allows you to use some special characters to instruct the search engine to give more or less weight to certain words or phrases when you're conducting a search, which in turn will change how the relvancy of the search is calculated.
These special Boolean characters are known as Operands. The table below lists the various operands you may use, along with examples of what each would tell the certificate search engine to do.
Note: When using any of the operands below you must be in Advanced mode.
| Operand | Meaning | Usage |
| No Operand | If no operand is specified the word is optional, meaning it may or may not appear in the document. However, the word's presence will give the document a higher relavancy score in the search results. | blue achievement : Will return results that contain either the word "blue" or the world "achievement". |
| + (plus) | Indicates that the word is Required to be present in each returned search result. | +blue achievement : Will return results that must contain the word "blue" and may contain the word "achievement". Those documents that contain both words will be given a higher relevancy score. Documents relevant for "achievement" but are not including "blue" will be excluded.
+blue +achievement : Will only return results that contain both the word "blue" and the word "achievement". All others will be excluded. |
| - (minus) | Indicates that the word must Not be present in each returned search result. The minus can be used to exclude results which are matched by the other search terms being used. Used by itself the minus operand will return an empty results set. | -blue achievement : Will return results that contain "achievement" but do not contain the word "blue". Effectively returning all non-blue achievement awards.
-blue baseball +achievement : Will return documents that must contain "achievement", may include "baseball" and cannot include blue. -blue -achievement : Returns nothing since every search term is excluded. |
| &rgt; (greater than) | Is used to increase the relevancy ranking of a search term. | &rgt;blue achievement : Returns results that may contain either "blue" or "achievement", giving a special emphasis to the word "blue" when ranking the results. |
| &lgt; (less than) | Is used to decrease the relevancy ranking of a search term. | &lgt;blue achievement : Returns results that may contain either "blue" or "achievement", lessening the relevancy emphasis for the word "blue" when ranking the results. |
| ( ) (parentheses) | Parentheses are used to group subexpressions, and can be nested. | +blue +(&rgt;baseball &lgt;achievement) : Returns results that must contain the words "blue" and "baseball" or "blue" and "achievement" (in any order), but will rank "blue baseball" higher than "blue achievement" because of the greater than/less than relevancy operands. |
| ~ (tilde) | Similar to the minus operand or the less than operand, the tilde causes the presence of a word to decrease the relevancy of a word in the returned result. Unlike the minus operand, tilde does not positively exclude the word. | ~blue achievement : Will return results containing either "blue" or "achievement", but with the "blue" de-emphasized in the relevancy ranking. |
| * (asterisk) | The asterisk is a special wildcard operand. Instead of appearing immediately before a search term it MUST appear at the end of term. Effectively it will cause a match to be registered when a document contains the sequence of letters entered, which may be followed by other letters. | +soccer +ball* : Will return results that must containt both the word "soccer" and some variation of the word "ball". For example, this search would return results for both "soccer ball" and "soccer balls". |
| " " (quotation marks) | Using quotations can be used to specify an exact phrase match of two or more words. If there are no exact matches no results will be returned. In everyday use, the quotation searches will not perform exactly as one might expect so is of little use. The main reason being that it requires an exact phrase match, including spaces. Using this operand is not suggested. | "blue achievement" : Will return any results where the database records contain the exact phrase in the exact word order and with the exact spacing. Or quite likely, nothing at all will be returned. |
Hopefully the above has helped to clear up any indecision or questions you have about our site search engine. Feel free to play with it if you would like to get used to how it works.
