Search Only Flood Hazard Mapping

Free-Text Query

Tips for Searching: Free-Text Queries
Use Free Text Queries if you want to enter queries using natural language. The search engine will examine your query, extract nouns and noun phrases, and construct a query for you. With Free Text Queries you may enter any text you wish, from a proper question, to a string of words and phrases, without worrying about the query language. For example, if you type in the following query:

"How does FEMA use GIS for flood hazard mapping purposes?"

the application will create a query for you automatically and begin the search. Note that when you're using free text queries, the regular query language features are disabled and keywords such as AND, OR, and NEAR are interpreted as normal words.

Tips for Searching: Basic Queries (None Free-Text Queries)
At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. To assist you in conducting searches of the Flood Hazard Mapping site, we have provided basic tips to help you expand the focus of your query for more complete results.

• Look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query form type river* to find river, riverine, and so on.
  
  
• Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type flood** to find flood, flooding, floodplain, and so on.
  
  
• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other (in physical proximity). For example, both of these queries, map and modernization and map near modernization, look for the words map and modernization on the same page. But when using NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: the closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.
  
  
• Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of flooding but not coastal, write the following query:
  
  flooding AND NOT coastal
  
  
• Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:
  
  FIRM OR DFIRM
  
  This query finds all pages that mention FIRM or DFIRM or both.
  
  
• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want the search engine to look for the exact word or phrase. For instance, if you type the following query:
  
  "base near flood"
  
  the application will literally look for the phrase base near flood. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks:
  
  base near flood
  
  it searches all documents for the words base and flood.