Search tips

This search engine helps you find documents on the Hannaford website. You find what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases or questions in the search box. The search engine responds by giving you a list of all the web pages and other files in the index relating to those topics. The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.

An example search:

Type "Alf Hannaford" in the search box.
Click the "Search button" or press the "Enter" key.

Tip: Don't worry when 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 appear at the top of the first result page.

What is an index?

Webster's dictionary describes an "index" as a sequential arrangement of material. Our index is a collection of pages from the Hannaford web site, including PDF files. A "spider" crawls the site every day looking for links to new pages. When you use our search engine, 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 engine needs to know how to separate words and numbers to find exactly what you want on the Hannaford site. 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 e.g. "covered smut".

Simple tips for more exact searches

Searches are case insensitive. Searching for "Seed" will match the lowercase "seed" and uppercase "SEED". Common words such as "and" or "is" are not indexed. Using more specific keywords in searches will provide better results with higher relevance.

Including or excluding words:

To make sure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To make sure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) sign before the keyword in the search box.

Example: To find a product to control loose smut in wheat that isn't Alphaflo, try "loose smut +wheat -alphaflo".