Blossom Search (http://www.blossom.com/) provides the search engine serving our site. Access to the search engine is provided throughout the City of Vestavia Hills’ website.

You are offered two distinct search options. Option 1 allows you to conduct a search based on a word or a phrase. Here are some tips for conducting your search:

The case of letters doesn't matter. All searches are case insensitive. This means you don't have to know whether a word is capitalized or not, or whether it is a title in all caps. For example, searching for "help" will match both "help" and "Help".

Each word is treated as a prefix. A word on a Web page will match your search string if it begins with the same letters. Thus, "bread" matches "bread", "breads", "breaded", "breading", and "breadth". (If you check the "Only match whole words" checkbox, then the whole word must match your string - that is, "bread" will only match "bread".)

Words in a phrase must be near one another. When you enter more than one word to search for, Web pages will be selected only if all the words you enter appear close to one another, typically in the same sentence or paragraph. If you surround the phrase with quotes ("..."), then it will only match pages where the words are next to one another. In this latter case, it should be noted that all the words in the search string will be highlighted in the found documents as per the second tip above.

The order of words in a phrase doesn't matter. If you enter more than one word, they will match a Web page if the same words appear near one another in any order. For example, "Mount Everest" will match "Mount Everest", "Everest Mountain", and "that awesome mountain, the great Everest".

Common words are ignored. Some words appear so commonly on website pages that Search.Blossom ignores them.

You also have the option to set the number of “hits per page”. If you check Standard, the search engine will find a predefined number of occurrences of your search word or phrase on one page. If you check Compact, it will find up to two occurrences, and if you check Unlimited, it will find all.

When a search is executed, the search engine will display a well-organized results page. This page will tell you the number of pages that contain your search word or phrase. It may also list links to pages where the search word or phrase occurs in various contexts, and show the number of such occurrences. The results page will always list a link to each page it has found containing your search phrase or word. Under this link is a brief summary of the wording of the text on the page and the context in which your search word or phrase (highlighted in red) is used.

If you click on such a link, an HTML version of the page appears with your search word or phrase highlighted in red so you readily can find what you searched for. This is also true for PDF documents. When you click on a link pointing to a PDF document on the website, the search engine will read the PDF file and create and display an approximated HTML version of this document with highlighting of your search word or phrase. This conversion to HTML will not occur if the PDF document exceeds a predefined size. If this is the case, clicking the link will activate the Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer and this applications will open the PDF document. You will then have to use the search feature of this applications to search the PDF document using the same search word or phrase. That will display the word or phrase on a shaded background.

Sometimes, when the search engine converts a PDF document to HTML, formatting may be lost. Furthermore, images included in the PDF file may not be displayed. If you encounter this problem and it is severe enough to interfere with your search interpretation, go to the top of the displayed HTML page and click the link located there. This will open the PDF document with the Adobe Acrobat Reader or within your browser, depending on your computer's configuration. You will then see a properly formatted PDF file with all contained images/graphics intact. Remember, you can conduct a search of the open PDF file using your same search word or phrase to see the words on a shaded background in the document.

Search Option 2 should be used when you are not sure what you are looking for, or you are unsure how to spell your search word. Let us say you are not sure whether Mayor McCallum’s name is spelled McCallum or McCollum, simply type in as many characters (up to 5, all displayed) as you think are correct. In our example: McC. The first results page will display a list of links to all occurrences of McC. If you click on the link McCallum, a second results page will display with the characteristics described under Option 1 above.

If you have problems finding what you are looking for, please visit the Site Map for our Web Site. We will endeavour to keep this site map up-to-date. There is a link at the bottom of each HTML page that look like this: Site Map