Help centre search looks for the words you typed, letter for letter, inside the title and the body of each article. It does not read your question and work out what you meant. That is why a full sentence usually comes back with nothing useful and a single plain word usually works. Search refund, not "how do I get my money back".
Three rules explain every disappointing result
- Every word you type has to appear in the article. Your query is split at the spaces and only articles containing all of the pieces survive. Adding a word can only ever narrow the result, never widen it. A seven-word question is seven separate conditions one article has to satisfy at once, and the ones that do are usually the wrong articles: they matched on "how", "get" and "my".
- A word matches only as the exact run of letters you typed. Nothing is stemmed and nothing is spell-corrected. "refund" and "refunded" both find articles, "refunding" finds none. "cancellation" works, "cancelation" finds nothing at all. Putting quotation marks around several words is stricter still: it looks for that exact phrase, unbroken.
- Results are not ordered by how well they match. They come back in the help centre's own browse order, collection by collection. Search "refund" and the article actually about refunds sits a long way down, below competition articles that happen to use the word once. The first result is not the best result. Read the list.
There is one more consequence of matching raw text: the search reads the article exactly as it is stored, link addresses and all. So a word like "https" that appears inside links matches dozens of articles that have nothing to do with it.
How to search so that it works
- Type the noun, not the sentence. "refund", "certificate", "payout", "drafts", "jury".
- If nothing comes back, take words out. Never add them.
- Use the word the site uses. "journal" rather than "blog post", "entry" rather than "submission", "discipline" rather than "category".
- Read down the whole list instead of stopping at the top three.
- Two characters is the minimum. One letter sends nothing at all, and the page keeps showing "Type at least two characters to search the help centre".
Search from inside the help centre, not from the main search bar
The search bar at the top of uni.xyz does not include help articles. It covers projects, journals, publications, competitions, people, organizations, topics, market products and images. Type a help question into it and you will get work, not answers, and it will look as though the help centre has nothing on your question.
Use the search box on uni.xyz/help, or on any help article page. That box is the only one that searches this content.
When the search cannot find it
Ask the assistant instead. It reads the same articles by meaning rather than by letters, so a whole question is exactly the right thing to type there, and it is the fastest way past everything described above. See What the UNI assistant is and, if you would rather reach a person, Contacting support.