The essentials of our search
Performing a search is easy. Simply type one or more search terms (the words or phrase that best describe the information you want to find) into the search box and click the Search button, or hit the Enter key on your keyboard.
In response, we produce a results page: a list of webpages, or downloads, related to your search terms, with the page with most hits appearing first.
Here are some basic tips to help you maximise the effectiveness of your search:
Choosing search terms
Choosing the right search terms is the key to finding the information you need.
Start with the obvious – if you're looking for general information on chartered status, you could try chartered.
But it's often advisable to use multiple search terms; if you want to get chartered status, you may do better with chartered marketer. You might also ask yourself if your search terms are sufficiently specific.
Capitalization
Searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for chartered marketer, Chartered Marketer, and cHarTeRed mArKetEr will all return the same results.
Automatic exclusion of common words
The search ignores common words and characters such as "how", "to" and "the", as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results.
If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by doing a phrase search, which simply means putting quotation marks around two or more words. Common words in a phrase search (e.g., "where are you") are included in the search as an exact phrase.
Phrase searches
Sometimes you'll only want results that include an exact phrase. In this case, simply put quotation marks around your search terms.
Phrase searches are particularly effective if you're searching for exact titles or phrases (e.g., "A history of advertising" or "Chartered Marketer status").
Search types
If you know what you're looking for you can use our section specific searches that will only pull back information on that type of information. These are: books, courses, events, study centres and consultants.
An advanced site search facility is under development, which will be available in the future, where you will be able to specify the type from the main site search.