Searching the Site

The menus, trail suggestions and other internal links are intended as the most effective way to find particular material in our 200 or so main pages (not counting the News, Events, Blogs and any experimental sections) - see About the site or start with the Section Index pages to the left.

Search engines don't always locate recent (or ancient) material, or cope with variations in spelling, phrasing or context. However, many people are used to just hitting the search button and we may not have made the navigation as clear as you would like. Plus search engines can help locate otherwise buried material.

We exclude the newsletter archives from search engines (all of them, not just phpDig) as material here may well be out of date. News items also get out of date, but we feel that it will be more obvious to casual readers that this could be the case.

Most search engines direct you to a page, not the actual word or phrase you are after. Your web browser's Find facility, often under the Edit menu, can then be useful if the page is large.

We only use data collected when searches are made to help us improve our content and site in general.

Search options

Important Note: At June 08 please don't use phpDig links, as you'll only end up back here! The service has been suspended for the moment.

Our dedicated site search engine, phpDig, mainly covers VolResource (and not VoluntaryNews or CharityBlog) but can't cope with the thousands of news pages on here to Feb 06 (for old items, please use Google instead). The CharityBlog site and the main VoluntaryNews pages have self-contained search functions which will find material just on that section - all of these automatically update themselves.

phpDig search boxes (top right of each page) have two question marks in them, and pressing the search button should take you to a results page, hosted on VoluntaryNews. There are one or two odd pages with our previous, and still working, FreeFind facility (see below). We will keep the database that the searches run from as up-to-date as we can.

phpDig isn't as sophisticated as Google but it does have some useful search options if you go to the full search page. By default, it looks for all words you enter, unless they have been excluded from its indexing as being too short or too common (which might evolve over time), across both sites.

(For those of you who like to know these things, phpDig is open source software, using php/mySQL.)

FreeFind

We've been offering site search via FreeFind since almost the start. It will still be here for a while yet. It re-checks the site for any new material about once a week (Sunday/Monday). See their Search Tips for more.

If you want to return to VolResource without using a search result, use your back button or similar.

Google

As well as being our (and many others) favourite search engine for the web as a whole, it can be used as a way of searching VolResource too. It can also cover VoluntaryNews.org.uk. We don't have any control over the frequency it re-checks and indexes the site content, but this is generally at least weekly.

Don't forget, doing a full Google web search takes you off the VolResource web site - please come back later!

Select:	VolResource.org.uk    VoluntaryNews.org.uk
	Web

While we don't get to see any info on Google usage, so have been encouraging use of phpDig (see above), that service is currently on hold.

Finding an organisation

We can't possibly list every voluntary organisation or support body in the UK - our resources are limited. We concentrate on giving 'top level' contacts - national groupings or offices, regional support agencies etc. - so that our coverage can be as wide as possible.

If you are after a very specific local organisation or topic of concern, a full web search could help assuming they have been running their site well for a while. Otherwise, see if we've got a support agency listed on our Local Contacts page, or a network mentioned on the Sub-sector (issues-based) Support page, as they often have directories of groups.

Registered charities

Charities operating in England and Wales can be located using the Charity Commission's Register of Charities or GuideStar UK, which has more powerful search facilities and potentially more information. Scottish charities may be added to GuideStar at some point, but meanwhile see Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.

External search

AltaVista can be good for 'complex' searches (compound search terms).

The BBC webwise pages currently (Apr 04) don't have tips on searching readily to hand, but there is still a beginner's guide to the internet.

Tackling Link Problems

We do check all external links (several thousand of them) on a regular basis, mainly using a software tool to highlight problems. Corrections are done as soon as possible, but we aren't perfect, plus there are some new ones we want to let you know about as soon as possible. So:

If you get a 'dead link' when clicking on a web site link, try editing the address (URL) which comes up on your browser - delete from the right section by section. So for www.dell.com/uk/sales/ try deleting sales/ first, then uk/. Often pages have been moved on a site - this will bring you back to base. And sometimes people get their .org or .com or .uk muddled or missed.

Please let us know if you encounter problems.