Better search: Tip 4 - Narrow your search

Dec. 4, 2016, 11:02 a.m. by HelenMcNally

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We've recently updated our search algorithms, so you're going to get fewer results, but those results will be more accurate.

To narrow down your results even further, here are some tips on how to get more relevant search results.

In our search results, we include results that are related to your search terms, but are not an exact match. For example, search for ‘consulting’ and you’ll see tenders for ‘consultation’ and ‘consult’. This usually makes our search results much better, but sometimes the related words aren’t relevant , for example if you search for  ‘bookkeeping’ when we look for related words, you might also get  ‘books’, which isn’t what you want.

Tip 1: Use quotation marks

If you are searching and you find that as you progress through the search results that you’re getting some results that aren’t right, it is worth using quotes on in your search. At the moment if you search for...

Cleaning services

You’ll get all of the results that mention ‘cleaning services’ but also all of the results that mention both ‘cleaning’ and ‘services’ and some results that mention either ‘cleaning’ or ‘services’. To make your search stricter, wrap the words in quotes, as follows:

“Cleaning services”

In this instance, you’ll only find items with “Cleaning services” and both ‘cleaning’ and ‘services’ but very few results with just ‘cleaning’ or ‘services’.

Tip 2: Use negative keywords

Using the ‘-’ sign in your search lets you exclude words that are not relevant to your search. So if you want a much more accurate search for bookkeeping it will be good to add some words that you don’t want to see:

Bookkeeping -books -bookings

If you’d like help with search, just start a chat with us and we’ll help you to find what you need.