Search Help

This page provides basic information about the search and how to use it to its fullest potential.

• Starting Your Search
• Narrowing Your Search Results
• Targeted Field Search
• URL Search

Starting your search

Type (a) word(s) into the Search box and click the Search button. If you type multiple words, pages containing all your search words will be returned.

Use the following commands to create more precise searches in the search box:

Use	To Find
and	Pages containing all of your search words. For example, typing food AND allergies will return pages that contain both of these words and any words which start with the main stem of either word. For example, documents with allergy and allergens will also be retrieved because the search engine will return both exact matches and variations of the words.
" " (quotation marks)	Pages containing an exact phrase. For example, typing "food allergies" will return only pages that contain the phrase "food allergies". So, if you only want to retrieve documents with food allergies and NOT food allergens, use the quotation marks or the NOT command below.
not	Pages which do not contain a particular word. For example, typing "food allergies" NOT allergens will return pages that contain the phrase food allergies but not the word allergens.

To expand your search using synonyms or alternate spellings, try the following commands in the Search box:

Use	To Find
or	Pages containing at least one of your search words. For example, typing BPA OR bishpenol will return pages that contain at least one of the search words.
* (wildcard)	Pages containing a word that matches a pattern of letters. For example, typing nutr* will return pages containing the words nutrition, nutrient, and/or nutritional.

Note: Searches are not case-sensitive and accented characters (more common in French) work with or without accents; using the words montreal, Montreal, montreal, montréal, or Montréal will return the same results.

Narrowing Your Search Results

Your search results will be grouped into categories on the right side of the search results screen. These categories, or subsets of your results, enable you to narrow your search further and are based on metadata.

Use	To narrow your results to:
Year	The year in which documents were last modified.
Subject	Subjects applied to documents from Health Canada's Controlled Subject Vocabulary.
Document Type	Specific kinds of document such as consultation papers, guides, legislation and regulations, media releases, policies, publications, statistics, etc.
Source	Health Canada branches, other government departments, third party organizations or individuals associated with documents.
Collection	Themes on the Health Canada website; e.g. Consumer Product Safety, Drugs and Health Products, Food and Nutrition, etc.

Targeted Field Search

Many documents contain additional information relating to its content. This is referred to as metadata, and is captured in fields. Searching for words in specific fields will return highly relevant results. The following syntax is used to search fields:

Operator	Results
field:expression	Returns documents where field matches expression.

The search supports five field searches: title, subject, type, description and creator.

The commands AND, OR, NOT can be used with a targeted field search to further narrow the search result set.

Examples

Query: title:funding

Returns documents whose "title" metadata field contains funding.

Query: title:safety AND type:publication

Returns documents whose "title" metadata field contains safety and whose "type" metadata field contains publication.

Query: title:"cost recovery"

Returns documents whose "title" metadata field contains the phrase cost recovery.

Query: creator:"healthy environments" AND subject:"climate change"

Returns documents whose "creator" metadata field contains the phrase healthy environments and whose "subject" metadata field contains climate change.

Query: description:"2007 health canada"

Returns documents whose "description" metadata field contains the phrase 2007 health canada

URL Search

Use the URL search to find documents from a particular section (folder) of the website. The following syntax is used:

Operator	Results
URL:expression	Returns documents whose URL matches the expression.

The commands AND, OR, NOT can be used with a targeted field search to further narrow the search result set.

Examples

Query: URL:fn-an

Returns documents from the Food & Nutrition section of the Health Canada Web site.

Query: URL:pubs AND title:management

Returns documents available on any of Health Canada's Reports & Publications pages which have the word management in the title.