Search tips
The following tips will help you to find information using the University of South Australia's searching options.
The UniSA search engine is updated every night. It makes extensive use of metadata contained in documents including the document author, title, description and keywords. This metadata is manually added by the document author.
Using the grey bar search
The grey bar search located at the top of most UniSA webpages does a very wide search of all information sources within the University.
- Use double quotes around multiple words eg "web authorisation form"
By using double quotes you will reduce the number of irrelevant documents in you search results. When typing in more then one word the search engine will return any document that contains one of the words you typed. If you put double quotes around the words then only documents that contain all of the words are returned
Using
the detailed search options
The detailed search options page allows you to search against specific areas in the University including divisions, schools and administrative areas. Note this is not a 'Boolean' search and does not allow you to use operators such as AND, NOT, NEAR etc.
- Type your search text into the text box for the type of area you want to
search against
- The areas have been grouped into top level, division, school, administrative and other areas.
- As for the grey bar search you can use double quotes around multiple words eg "web authorisation form"
- Select the specific area you wish to search against in the drop down list located directly under the text box you typed your search text into
- Use the grey button located directly next to the drop down list to begin your search.
Using the Google search
Google is a popular external search engine which has been added as another search option to use on the detailed search page.
- Note it is an external search engine and is not managed or supported by UniSA staff
- It is not updated as frequently as the internal search engine and
may contain outdated results
- type your search text into the text box for Google search
- use the radio button directly under the text box to select whether to search just UniSA content (UniSA only) or the entire Internet (Internet)
- Use the Google search grey button located directly next to the text box list to begin your search.
Return to the detailed search page