Need help finding what you are looking for? We will show you how to use the K4Health Custom Search to deliver the health information you need.

What is the K4Health Custom Search?

Powered by a special Google search solution, K4Health Custom Search provides users an efficient way to find relevant information through a single search query.

Enter your search term(s) in the search box at the upper right corner of the page and select the K4Health collection of interest from the drop-down menu next to the search box. Read more about each of our collections.

How it works

K4Health search works exactly like a regular Google web search.  Below are some tips for successful searches. If you need additional help, please contact the K4Health Custom Search team at www.k4health.org/contact.

• Keep it simple. If you're looking for information on a specific contraceptive method, for example, start with its name.
• Describe what you need with as few terms as possible. The goal of each word in a query is to focus it further. Since all words are used, each additional word limits the results.
• Choose descriptive words. The more unique the word is, the more likely you are to get relevant results.

Most queries do not require advanced operators or unusual syntax.  However, in some cases you may want to use these methods for increasing the precision of your search. Here are some examples of more advanced searches you can do:

Phrase search ("")
By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling the search system to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. Our search system already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal when returning results, so quotes are only necessary when you want results that contain that exact phrase and nothing more.

Terms you want to exclude (-)
Inserting a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. For example, in the query [ anti-inflammatory drugs ], the minus sign is used as a hyphen and will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol; whereas the query [ anti-inflammatory -drugs ] will search for the words 'anti-inflammatory' but exclude references to drugs. You can exclude as many words as you want by using the - sign in front of all of them, for example [ tree -maple -oak -leaves ].

The OR operator
The default behavior of our search system is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, [ USAID 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ USAID 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)