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Search Help

Understanding how the Search tool works
To start a search, type a few keywords that address your product of interest and a topic or issue into the Search field. Then click the Search button (the magnifying glass) or press Return to get the results. Our search engine uses the words you type to return results based on how you entered the text.

If you type a simple keyword in the field, such as Addison, you may be faced with many search results. To narrow your results, type two or more words, such as Addison house—or better yet, be even more specific by typing Addison house plans—and the Search tool will return documents that contain all the words you specified.

Choosing a good search string
The words you type in the Search field are known collectively as a “search string.” As a general rule, don't type just one word. You'll probably get tons of results that may have nothing to do with your question. Type at least two or three keywords that name a product and a topic. Don't type too many or you may see few results; if this is the case, remove a word or two from your search string and try again.

The search engine also looks at the order in which you type your words. The first word gets priority, while everything that follows takes less precedence incrementally. While the search engine will generally return about the same number of documents, the order of your Search Results rankings may differ, depending on your wording.

Do be specific. Try not to use broad keywords. If you type Addison, you'll get a lot of results that may or may not match the answers that you seek. Instead, choose particular words. For example, depending on what “Addison” information you're looking for, you can better focus the search with these search strings:

Addison community
Addison community connectivity
Addison sections for sale
Avoid typing complete sentences as your search string; they generally won't yield many (or any) results. For example, if you type Who do I call regarding buying a new home at Anselmi Ridge?, our Search tool will look for documents that contain every one of these words (and won't find any). Instead, focus on keywords by simply typing Anselmi Ridge sales. The text may sound pretty Cro-Magnon, but you'll have much better success.

Use quotation marks (or parenthesis) to streamline results
Instead of sorting through documents that feature random instances of all your search string words, you can make the search engine return only the documents that match a specific phrase. How? Simply wrap a search string phrase in quotation marks (or if you prefer, you can use parenthesis instead). The Search tool will only return results that include that exact phrase in your specified order. This works well if you want to target a specific phrase, or a particular subject that has multiple words. You can still add other keywords outside of your quoted phrase for further focus. For example:

"Managing Future Growth"
Video (inspired thinking)
Anselmi Ridge "sections for sale"

Narrow results by excluding words
You can exclude results that contain certain words by simply putting a hyphen (-) immediately in front of the word that you want to exclude. Make sure that you include a space before the hyphen but not after it (don't type a space between the hyphen and the word you want to exclude).

For example, if you wish to view all the news items about sections for sale but exclude those relating to Addison, you could type news "sections for sale" -addison. This tells the search engine that you want information on news, you want all documents to include the phrase “sections for sale” and you want to exclude all documents that are geared toward Addison by telling the engine not to return documents that contain the word “addison”

Refine results with Advanced Search
If you want the highest degree of control over your search results, Advanced Search is for you. You can access Advanced Search by either clicking the Advanced Search link in any Search box or clicking Search in the top navigation bar.

The Advanced Search tool gives you a few options that allow you to dictate how you want the search engine to function. You can control how the engine uses words in the search string—you can have it search for all words, an exact phrase, match at least one of the words, and exclude certain words. Each of these fields functions similarly to what we showed you earlier. For example, the “exact phrase” field serves the same function as if you'd typed quotation marks around a phrase, while the “without the words” field functions like the word exclusion method.

You can also select a specific McConnell product from the Product pop-up menu to limit your search results, select a category (such as Addison, McConnell Property, Anselmi Ridge, and more), dictate the type of content you want (such as News, PDF documents, Videos, and more) , and even sort the results.