Using the Search Bar

When you enter a keyword or words into the search bar (either on the GrantNav homepage or the search results page) and click ‘Search‘, GrantNav searches through all the grants in the 360Giving dataset and presents results in order of relevance – with the results that match the most words at the top.

By default, GrantNav searches a range of key fields in the grant record – this includes the grant title and description, the names of places, the names of funders and recipients, and some of the other useful information that the funder has published.

The search bar is particularly useful for searching for keywords or terms, as there is no single filter you can use to determine the theme or purpose of a grant.

Keywords

When searching for keywords it is important to think about the different language people may use to describe similar things, and incorporate these into your searches. For example, if you are looking for results of grants awarded for work with children, depending on your goal you may also want to include search terms like “young people”, youth and schools as well as children.

Where you include multiple search terms, for example, children and young, GrantNav will, by default, return all results that include either the word children or the word young, as well as the records that include both words. This can be useful as you can include multiple search terms in the same search.

Example: Searching for children young school will return all results that include the word children, the word young, OR the word school. By default, the grants which match the most words will appear first when the sort selector is set to ‘Best Match’.

Explore in GrantNav: children young school

You can also refine your search using the search operators and filters described in the following sections to help you find the most relevant results.

Using operators and special characters

Quotation Marks

If you’re looking for a specific phrase or name that is made up of two or more words, put quotation marks ( “ “) around it to refine your search. This means the search looks for the words appearing together, in that exact order, rather than appearing individually.

Example: Searching for mental health without quotation marks will return all results that include the word mental OR health, while using quotation marks, “mental health”, will only return results where the words mental and health appear together in that order.

Explore in GrantNav: Search 1: mental health | Search 2: “mental health”

Search Operators

The search bar also allows you to create a more specific search by defining combinations of words which must or must not appear, using operators. The operators are words that the search engine treats as instructions. To work, the operators must be in capital letters. Two operators are available:

AND

Which returns search results that must include both terms in any order

Example: Searching for young AND people will return all results that include both words, young and people in any order. Without the operator, GrantNav will return all results with either young, people or both.

Explore in GrantNav: Search 1: young AND people | Search 2: young people

NOT

Which excludes any results that contain a word(s)

Example: youth NOT clubs – this will return all results that include the word youth but do not include the word clubs.

Explore in GrantNav: Search: youth NOT clubs

Wildcard *

You can use the * symbol (wildcard) in place of any number of characters.

Example: LGBT* will return results that contain LGBT plus any other characters e.g. LGBT+, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA+

Stemming

GrantNav uses a process called stemming, which means it returns results for different forms of the same word; for example, searching for disability will also look up disabilities, disabled etc.

Elements ignored by search

Text search isn‘t case-sensitive, other than for the AND and OR operators described above, so capital and lower-case letters will match each other; GiRlS will return the same result as girls.
Diacritics (accents) are ignored, so Esmee matches Esmée.
Hyphens are treated like a space, so home-start will return the same results as home start

Irrelevant results

Where you have included multiple words in the search bar, GrantNav will return results which contain at least one of the search terms. For example, searching for mental health children GrantNav will first show results that contain all the words, then those which contain two of the words, and then those which contain only one. Depending on your goal this could mean that it is returning grants that are not relevant to you.

If your search matches lots of results, then even though the ones on the first page are relevant to you, the ones further down might not be. If you’re using search results for research or statistical work, be sure to check grants that appear further down in the results to make sure that the entries are all relevant. You can do this easily by changing the sort order from “Best Match” to “Award Date – Latest First”, as this will remove the prioritisation of the most relevant results.