Basic Search Essentials
The Official City Documents Home page provides a full-text search of all or select Official City Documents. Each section of Official City Documents provides a full-text search field to search documents within that section. Additional advanced search pages are provided in some sections for a more specific field search.
Searching for Official City Documents 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 press the Search button.
In response, a results page will be returned with a list of PDF documents related to your search terms.
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 garage sales, try garage sales.
But it's often advisable to use multiple search terms; if you're planning to have your own garage sale and want to know about garage sale permits, you'll do better with permits garage sales than with either permits or garage sales by themselves.
Capitalization
Searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for san diego, San Diego, and san diEGO will all return the same results.
Automatic "and" queries
By default, search results only display files that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results. To restrict a search further, just include more terms. For example, to find a list of City Council agendas specifically, simply search for "city council agendas", not just "agendas."
Exclusion of common words
Exclude common words and characters such as "where" and "how", 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 putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.) Another method for doing this is conducting a literal 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.
Word variations
Search results will not only include items related to your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms. If you search for business regulations, business taxes, permits and licenses, your search results will also include business license, and other related variations of your terms.
Literal searches
Sometimes you'll only want results that include an exact phrase. In this case, simply put quotation marks around your search terms, "public improvement and assessment proceedings".
Phrase searches are particularly effective if you're searching for proper names ("San Diego"), quotes ("we've got a lot of work to do"), or other famous phrases ("America's Finest City").