The IFoA's new website has a terrible search facility - here are two ways you can search it much more effectively

by Patrick Lee on 30 Apr 2022 in categories actuarial tech with tags Google search

The new website's search facility is of little practical use

The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries has recently upgraded its website, with a new look.

Unfortunately, the search facility is far worse than it was before.  For example, if you search for "member pledge"  you currently get this result:

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We couldn't find a match for "member pledge". Please try another search.

So for practical purposes the signposted search facility within the IFoA's new website is of little use: you will miss relevant documents, or worse (as we saw with the member pledge) think that no relevant documents exist.

Two ways to still have a good search experience on the site

The first is that you can (for the moment, unless they remove it) still go to their old site search facility at https://www.actuaries.org.uk/search/site and enter in your search term there.  

E.g. entering member pledge is equivalent to going to https://www.actuaries.org.uk/search/site/member%2520pledge and that brings up lots of results, including the Member Pledge page, and on the right hand side some options to filter the results down further.

The second is a standard way to use Google to search within a site.  In Google's search bar, just prefix your search term by site:urlofthesite, e.g. here site:actuaries.org.uk

So a search for member pledge is 

site:actuaries.org.uk member pledge

which is equivalent to https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aactuaries.org.uk+member+pledge&oq=site%3Aactuaries.org.uk+member+pledge

which brings up lots of pages: 

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