There's several different ways to locate specific permit or license records within Civic Review. This article will demonstrate how to use the search bar, filtering in the All Permit section, and using Wildcards.

The search bar at the top of your screen performs a flexible search, and allows you to find records that have any occurrence of the text you type in. So, a search for 123 would end up finding any record that has the numbers "123" in them. Records that have "123" in the name or in the permit number are pushed to the top. Records that have multiple occurrences of "123" also take higher priority. Most of the time, just typing in text in the top search area will find what you need.

Let's say you have a business license you know for sure has an address of 123 Street Blvd. The search algorithm at the top of your screen prioritizes individual words and occurrences of those words. So, based on the search term below, some other records are pushed to the top of the results before the one we're looking for:

Perform an exact match search by wrapping your search term in quotes. This says, "I want to find records that have all of these words exactly as they are typed here". Typing in "123 Street Blvd" would indeed find your record. FYI, exact match is still case insensitive.

Filters in the All Permits section are not as intelligent as the general search bar portrayed above. The search bar method described above will search for a term found in any of the permit details of any records. Searching using filters in the All Permit section is useful if you want to search within a particular permit type or permit field.

EXAMPLE: if you know that you can find a business license using the field "Business Address", adding a filter like so will create an "Exact Match" search within that specific field.

To learn more about the All Permit section check out this help article.

You can use the asterisk *, often called the wildcard, to fine-tune your filters in the All Permit section. The wildcard acts as a replacement for anything.

For example, if you're looking for any address on Street Blvd, you can type *Street Blvd. This will look for anything that ends with "Street Blvd". So it would match "1250 East Street Blvd", as well as "123 Street Blvd". However, it would not match "123 Street Boulevard" since it does not end with "Street Blvd".

The great news is you can add multiple wildcards to make that work. If you input *123 Street*. This will look for anything that has "123rd Street" in it, with anything before or after (including nothing). This way, "10 123 Street #2" would match, as well as "123 Street Blvd", and "123 Street Boulevard". You can also put wildcards in the middle. So, for example, *123*#* would match "10 123 Street #2" and "10 123 St #4".

Wildcards only work with filters, and doesn't work within the search bar.

Congratulations! Now you know multiple methods to locate specific records within Civic Review.

For a video overview of this topic; check out this video: