Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon Portland Community College

Website search help

To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press the Enter key or click the Search Website button for a list of relevant results. Our search uses text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search.

Your results

Every search result lists one or more excerpts from the web page.

Refining your search

By default, our search returns pages that best match given search terms based on natural language. There is no need to include “and” between terms. For example, to search for “electrical” and “engineering” enter “electrical engineering”. To broaden or restrict the search, include fewer or more terms.

Excluding words

You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign (“-“) immediately in front of the term you want to exclude. Make sure you include a space before the minus sign.

For example, the search:


will return pages about engineering that do not contain the word “electrical.”

You can search for phrases by adding quotation marks. Words enclosed in double quotes (“like this”) appear together in all returned documents. Phrase searches using quotation marks are useful when searching for famous sayings or specific names.

For example, the search:


is treated as a phrase search due to the search words being enclosed in double quotes.