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This section introduces basic search concepts, and describes advanced techniques that produce more efficient Comptroller.Texas.Gov search results.
Getting Started with Search
To search Comptroller.Texas.Gov, type a few descriptive words in the search box, and press the Enter key or click the search button. A results page appears with a list containing your search terms, with the most relevant search results appearing at the top of the page. By default, only pages that include all of your search terms are returned. So to broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms. You do not need to include "and" between the terms. For example, to search for engineering product specification documents, type the following:
Capitalization
Searches are not case sensitive; All letters are handled as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington," "George Washington," and "George washington" return the same results.
Common Words
Because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results, search ignores some terms, including:
- Common words and characters, such as "where" and "how," when they are used in conjunction with other search terms
- Certain single digits and single letters
If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a plus ("+") sign in front of it. Include a space before the "+" sign, but not after it.
Alternatively, you can enclose a series of words with quotation marks and do a phrase search.
Date Sort
By default, search results are sorted by relevance, with the most relevant result appearing at the top of the page. If you want to sort the documents by date instead, click the Sort by Date link.
Numbers
When you search for numbers, do not use exponential numbers, such as "1e10," or negative integers, such as "-12."
Numbers that are separated by commas are treated as separate figures, not fractional numbers; that is, the comma is treated as a term separator, not a decimal separator. For example, if you type "3,75", the search query is treated as a search for two separate terms, "3" and "75", not the decimal fraction, "three and three quarters." Commas that separate every three digits are ignored and are not necessary. For example, both "10,000" and "10000" are treated alike.
Widening Your Search
You can expand your search by using the OR operator. To retrieve pages that include either word A or word B, use an uppercase OR between terms. For example, to search for an office in either Austin or Dallas, type the following:
Refining Your Search
Since the search appliance returns only web pages that contain all of the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. The refined query returns a subset of the pages that were returned by your original broad query. If that does not get the results that you want, you can try to exclude words, search for exact phrases, or restrict the search to a range of numbers. These techniques are described in the following subsections.
Word Exclusion
If your search term has more than one meaning, you can focus your search by adding a minus sign ("-") in front of words related to the meaning you want to avoid. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign. You can daisy chain a list of words you want to exclude.
For example, to search for the planet Saturn and exclude search results about the car company or Roman god, type the following query:
The search appliance returns pages about Saturn that do not contain the word "car" or "god."