HouseWeb Search Engine Tips

Search Engine Tips

To find information about a topic, simply type in a few keywords. The more detailed your query, the more relevant your results.

Our search engine also comes with some advanced capabilities to help you find exactly what you're looking for. These capabilities are best shown with a few examples:

Translated: require MORTGAGE, require info: Finds "MORTGAGE info", "MORTGAGE information", and "information of type MORTGAGE".
Does not find the lowercase "MORTGAGE information", nor the abbreviated "MORTGAGE inf".
Translated: forbid MORTGAGE, require info: Finds "Housing info", "Moving info", and lowercase "mortgage info".
Does not find "MORTGAGE defined" nor "MORTGAGE info".
Translated: prefer MORTGAGE, require info: Finds "Mortgage info", "MORTGAGE info", and "MORTGAGE Info".
Documents with both terms appear higher in the list.
Translated: require the phrase "MORTGAGE info": Finds "MORTGAGE info".
Does not find "MORTGAGE Info" nor "info of type MORTGAGE".
Translated: require mortgage (case insensitive), require words starting with "info": Finds "MORTGAGE info", "mortgage information", "Mortgage informer".
The asterisk is a wildcard representing any four or fewer characters.
Translated: require Venus (case sensitive), require pictures, forbid planet, prefer images: First lists "pictures and images of Venus", then "Venus pictures".
Does not list lowercase "venus picture", nor forbidden "picture of planet Venus".
Translated: ignores common words like where, is, and the - requires words containing "frog": Finds "frog", "frogleg", and "bullfrog".
To suppress the ignore feature, use quotes, as in "Where is the *frog*?".

Note on case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "usa" will match "Usa", "USA", and "usA", while the term "USA" matches only its uppercase version.

The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "powerfu*earch" would not match the first sentence of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.

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