Search Rules
The Borough of Metuchen search engine helps you find information on this website. Here's how it works: you tell the search service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving you a list of all the Web pages and documents in our index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results. The search engine will search HTML (web) pages, PDF documents, Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.
How To Use:
Tip: Don't worry if you find a large number of results. In fact, use more than a couple of words when searching. Even though the number of results will be large, the most relevant content will always appear at the top of the result pages.
More Basics - An Overview
What is an Index?
Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a large, growing, organized collection of Web pages. When you use our search service, you search the entire collection using keywords or phrases.
What is a Word?
When searching, think of a word as a combination of letters and numbers. The search service needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Internet. You can separate words using white space and tabs.
What is a Phrase?
You can link words and numbers together into phrases if you want specific words or numbers to appear together in your result pages. If you want to find an exact phrase, use "double quotation marks" around the phrase when you enter words in the search box.
Example #1: To find a Borough phone number, you can type "what is the phone number for the Planning Board" in the search box. You can also create phrases using punctuation or special characters such as dashes, underscore lines, commas, slashes, or dots.
Example #2: Try searching for 1-800-999-9999 instead of 1 800 999 9999. The dashes link the numbers together as a phrase.
Simple Tips for More Exact Searches
Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Redevelopment" will match the lowercase "redevelopment" and uppercase "REDEVELOPMENT".
Expand your search using wildcards (*):
By typing an * within a keyword, you can match up to four letters.
Example: Try wish* to find wish, wishes, or wishful.
