Search Help

• How to Improve Your Results
• Search Engine Rules (Basic Search)
• Basic Search Types
• Search Engine Rules (Advanced)
• Boolean Operators

How to Improve Your Results

The best way to improve your results is to optimize the structure of your query. The more the TxDOT Search engine "understands" your request, the better its returns will be.

Search Engine Rules (Basic Search)

Here are the rules that the search engine follows when it processes your query:

Case is not an issue. The search engine is case insensitive so, the query "User Manual" will return the same results as "user manual".

All searches are exact match searches. It looks for pages that contain the exact term entered in the Search text box. For example, if you enter business division, the search will return results that match exactly the entered text.

Common words are ignored. It ignores all punctuation marks and all "noise" words that would significantly slow down returns without improving results.  The omitted words are: a, about, an, and, are, as, at, be, by, for, from, in, is, it, of, on, or, that, the, this, to, was, what, when, where, which, who, will, and with.

Wildcards.  The query man* will return all documents containing "man" as part of a word, i.e. "manual", "manually" and so on.

Basic Search Types

By default, the initial search will perform a query looking for an exact match in the Title or Keywords or Description area of the document.  Here are the search types that can be used with the Basic Search:

Search Type	Description
Title	This basic search will look for a match in the Title area of a document.
Keyword	This basic search will look for a match in the Keyword area of a document.
Description	This basic search will look for a match in the Description area of a document.
Title or Keyword or Description	This basic search will look for a match in the Title or Keyword or Description area of a document. This search is an "OR" search.  The search term only has to be found in one of these areas to return a result to the Search results page.
Free Form	This basic search will look for a match throughout the whole document.  This basic search will return the largest number of results and should be used as a last resort to find information on the site.

Boolean Operators

Here are the symbols and words you can use to improve your queries.

Symbol	Function	Examples
AND	Finds pages that contain all terms or phrases.	construction AND road
AND NOT	Excludes pages that contain a term or phrase.	mobile AND NOT wireless
( )	Used to group words in OR and NOT queries.	(mobile device) | (wireless device)(mobile device) AND NOT (wireless device)
OR	Finds either term.	(mobile device) OR (wireless device)