IFAP Search Help

Welcome to IFAP search help. This page helps you determine which search best fits your needs.

Simple Searches

From the IFAP main page, a simple search can be conducted by simply entering a phrase in the space provided in the IFAP Publications Search Tool area and pressing the Search button.

Phrasing Your Search

There are several ways in which to phrase a search, depending on how broad you wish the results to be.

·  Natural Language Searches - this type of search will return broad results. When doing a natural language search, simply type in the phrase and the search engine will extract the meaning of your search to find related documents. Some examples of natural language searches include:

·         Information on Obtaining Pell Grants

·         Financial aid for college

·         Recertification documentation and applications

·  Keyword Searches - this type of search looks for a keyword or keywords entered by the user. The search engine returns documents that contain all the keywords involved. Some examples include:

·         training - returns documents with the keyword "training" within it.

·         financial aid - returns documents that contain both keywords "financial" and "aid." Note that this is the same as the Boolean search financial AND aid explained below. Also, if you want to find documents relating to financial aid, you could perform a phrase search, explained below.

·  Phrase Searches - this type of search will return documents based on a phrase entered by the user. The phrase must be entered in quotations. If quotation marks are not used, then the search engine treats it like a keyword search. Some examples include:

·         "SFA Coach" - returns documents with the phrase "SFA Coach" within it.

·         "668.16" - any keyword that contains a decimal point must be treated like a phrase and thus placed in quotation marks.

·  Boolean Searches - this type of search looks for keywords or phrases within a document. The keywords or phrases are separated by Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) which must be in uppercase letters. Here are the explanations of the common Boolean operators:

·         AND - used when a search must return two or more expressions:

o        financial AND aid - returns documents containing both keywords "financial" and "aid."

·         OR - used when a result must contain either or both of the expressions:

o        aid OR pell - returns documents containing one or both the keywords "aid" and "pell."

·         NOT - used when a result must contain one expression but not the other:

o        ("student loan") NOT pell - returns documents with the phrase "student loan" but excludes documents also containing the keyword "pell."

·         NEAR - used to find documents with the expressions near each other:

o        SFA NEAR coach - returns documents where "SFA" is within 10 words of "coach."

·         NEARnn - used where 'nn' is a number; returns documents where the given expressions are within 'nn' words from each other:

o        loan NEAR20 default - return documents where "loan" is within 20 words of "default."

·  Wildcards - use wildcards to search for documents where the phrases are hard to spell, unclear, or there are different verb tenses.

·         Asterisks - used to replace any set of unknown letters in a search term:

o        consolida* - returns documents containing terms beginning with "consolida", including consolidate, consolidated, and consolidation.

·         Question Marks - used to replace a single unknown character:

o        CA?FAA -returns documents containing acronyms like CASFAA and CAPFAA.

Advanced Searches

Click the Advanced Search link on the home page to conduct a more advanced search with more options available to narrow the results. Enter the search phrase in the space provided and select from the various options available on the page. After entering the options wanted, press the Search button to return the results. The following is an explanation of the options available:

• Publication Date - Enter a date value here if you want to only return documents published on a certain date. The date format should be MM/DD/YYYY.
• Posted Date - Enter a date value here if you want to only return documents posted on a certain date. The date format should be MM/DD/YYYY.
• Number of Results - Enter the number of documents that the search should return.
• Minimum Result Threshold - The minimum result threshold is a number that is used to specify how close a match is needed for the document to be deemed worthwhile and be returned in the result set. The higher this number, the more closely the information the documents will match your search. As the threshold increases, the number of results descreases. This is because there will be too few documents to make the threshold cutoff.
• Show Short Summary - Check this option to show the first few lines of the document in the search results. Unchecking this box will display only the title of the document on the search results page.
• Publication Type Selection - Highlight the types of publications that you want to search. Hold down the Ctrl button to select multiple publication types.

Results Page

After the results page appears with the results of your search, the following options allow you to narrow your search even more:

• Weight - This percentage measures the relevance of the result to what was submitted for the search. By using a combination of word count, proximity, occurrence, and other attributes of words in a document, a score is derived. The higher this number the more relevant the document should be to the search.
• Suggest - when you check this option and search again by pressing the Suggest More button, the search engine uses the selected document's internal weights to find related documents. It is analogous to the phrase "if you like this document, you may like these also."