Isle of Man Guide

The search engine can be used to find specific words or phrases in the text of all the pages of the Isle of Man Guide as well as selected pages from the local business directory of the Isle of Man Portal, which will be displayed to the left-hand side of the page.

To perform a search, simply enter a word, phrase or set of keywords into the search box and either press return or click the search button. If a page contains any of the words of your search query, it will be returned. However, pages will be ranked and listed in order of their judged relevance to your query. The combination of three main factors determines the rank of a page in a given query:

• Frequency - The more frequently the words of your search query appear on the page, the higher the ranking of that page in your search.
• Position - The location of the matched words in a page will determine how relevant it is judged to be: pages with search words appearing in their titles will be given higher importance than those with search words appearing only in the main body of the text.
• Phrases - The closer together the words of the search string are in the text, the higher the page will be ranked; so if you're searching for a specific phrase, for example searching for: Manx Electric Railway, is more likely to return pages specifically mentioning the Manx Electric Railway than those pages that just happen to contain all or some of those three words scattered amongst the text.

Therefore, you do not need to enclose phrases in quotes or use any special symbols or keywords such as "+" or "and" or "or" in order to control the matching of search words. Simply enter a set of search words separated by spaces and all pages containing any of those words will be returned, though ranked in an appropriate manner.

The following points concerning the processing of your search query may help you to search the site and find what you need more efficiently:

• Word Stemming - All search words are subjected to a stemming algorithm; so that, for example, searching for cycling, cycled, cycle or cycles will give identical results.
• Capitalisation - Any capitalisation of words in the query is ignored, so searching for Port Erin will return exactly the same results as searching for port erin.
• Punctuation - Any punctuation in the query is also ignored, a search for St. John's is identical to a search for St Johns.
• Stop Words - Certain common words, such as the or and are removed from the query prior to the search so as to produce more meaningful results. For example, searching for cycling in Port St. Mary on the Isle of Man is identical to searching for cycling Port St. Mary Isle Man (or due to word stemming and ignoring capitalisation and punctuation, also identical to searching for cycle port st mary isle man).
• Word Order - The order of the words in the query is irrelevant; so a search for cycle port st mary isle man, as in the previous example, is the same as searching for isle of man port st mary cycle.