Search Help

One of the fastest way to find information on our site, which currently contains over 1,000 pages of information, is to search for it.

The search box and help link can be found at the top of almost every page in the County site.

Searching Basics

The search box uses a 'pattern-match' system to find information. This means that it will look for the series of letters, numbers, and symbols you enter, in its entirety, to show up anywhere in the text of the page. If it finds the pattern at least once, the page is added to the results. If not, the page is left out.

This means if you perform a search for 'com', for example, the search results page will display the title of any page where those three letters showed up together. So words such as 'telcom', 'commission', 'commissioner', 'commerce', 'commercial', etc. would all satisfy the search requirements and that page would display on the results.

The pattern match doesn't break words up, so if you searched for 'law library', only pages where those two words showed up together would display. Law alone, library alone, or even a page where both words appeared, just not together, would be excluded.

Getting More Sizzle for Your Search

If a basic search is giving you too many (or too few) results, the search feature is set up to allow you some additional options.

If you have two or more words, word phrases, or parts of words, and you want to search for all of them, but not necessarily next to each other, you can place a '+' sign before each section. Any pages returned from this search will have all the pieces you are searching for, but each piece can show up in any part of the page.

For example: Take our previous search for 'law library'. As is, only pages with that exact phrase would list on the results page. If you wanted, however, all pages with the word 'law' and the word 'library', in any position, you could search for 'law +library'. This would return any page where both words showed up somewhere on the page.

Alternatively, say you wanted information on libraries, but not the law library. By using the '-' key, you can exclude words, word phrases, or parts of words. So to search for pages which contain the word 'library' but not the word 'law', you would search for 'library –law'.

You can combine '+' and '-' symbols and have more than two phrases if necessary to pare down your results.

Some Helpful Hints

Only search for what you need. While you could search, for example, for 'washoe county commission' to get information about the Commission, you may only need to search for 'county commission' or even just 'commission' and still get a reasonable range of results. The more complex the search term, the more likely you are to exclude something unintentionally.

Searches are case-insensitive, so don't worry about matching the case in your search.

The search feature searches pages only at this point. Future functionality will allow PDF and other files to be searched.