Keep your search simple You can refine it afterwards in Advanced Search if you get too many results. You do not need to use upper case or punctuation, e.g. st marys church.
Only use keywords You do not need to use ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘in’, or general words such as ‘club’ or ‘service’, just the important words, e.g. disabled swimming bury, instead of ‘a disabled swimming club in Bury’.
Use phrase marks (“”) If you are looking for two or more keywords that you want to appear next to each other use phrase marks (quotation marks) to keep the words together, e.g. “home help”, “Suffolk Family Carers”. This will make a big difference in the relevance and number of results returned.
Do NOT use symbols such as &, :, -, ! Some symbols are not recognised and no records will be returned for your search if you use these.
Use the word ‘or’ for more results Use ‘or’ if more than one word describes an activity, e.g. gardening or horticulture (but do not place this in phrase marks).Or in Advanced Search choose the Any Word option under the keyword box.
Be specific Try to be as specific as you can when choosing your keywords, e.g. instead of care, use “day care”, “nursing care”, or childcare; or badminton instead of sport.
Search by location to narrow the results You can add place names to your keywords; however, results may appear where the contact address is in that location, but not necessarily the venue. But keep the location name out of the phrase marks, i.e. beccles “girl guides”. Or choose a location in the Advanced Search.
General Tips
Too many results? Suffolk InfoLink contains details of thousands of organisations which support people who live and work in Suffolk, so you may find you get a large number of results. Click on Refine Search at the bottom of the list of results. This will take you to Advanced Search where you can add more keywords or chose some of the other options.
None or too few results? Check your spelling. Have you refined too much? If so remove some of your options.
What’s the record about? Quite often your keyword(s) will not appear in the name of the organisation. Please read the description or details within the full record to see the full range of services offered.
Want more of what you’re looking for? When you have the search results you want, you can find similar types of organisations by clicking on one of the Subjects, under the Further Information heading.
Advanced Search
More options. Advanced Search offers you more options, such as keyword, location, category and age group. You can select all or a few of these to search. If you then get very few results see General Tips for more help.
Location. Locations are arranged by local council area, e.g. Babergh, Forest Heath, and then by main town or village.
More results per page. If you want to see more results on one page alter the number of results, up to 50, per page.
Popular Searches
Links to popular topics. If you are not sure what keywords to use try one of the Popular Searches. These are links to popular topics or groups of similar records that may be hard to search for, e.g. community transport, children’s centres. Suggest a Popular Search.
