Search ranks results by hybrid relevance — semantic meaning and keyword matching together. You do not have to guess the exact words a program used in its notice.
Write queries in plain English
“Funding for after-school STEM programs in California” is a good query. It carries a topic, an activity and a place, and the semantic half of the ranking uses all three.
Short keyword stabs like “education” work less well, because they describe a category rather than a project.
Why an empty result is a real answer
Search applies a minimum-relevance floor. If nothing clears it, you get no results rather than a page of loosely-related noise.
That is deliberate. A funding search that always returns something trains you to distrust it. When OpenGrants returns nothing, it means nothing in the corpus is a strong match for that phrasing — which is useful information.
When a query comes back empty you will often see below-threshold near-misses listed underneath. Those are there to help you rephrase — they usually reveal a typo or an adjacent vocabulary the field actually uses.
Open by default
Search returns currently open, applyable opportunities by default. You do not need to add date filters to exclude closed programs — that is already the behavior.
To research what has already been funded, switch to awarded results. See Researching awarded projects.
Start broad, then narrow
The pattern that works:
- One broad search in your own language.
- Read the facets — the breakdown by state, amount band, deadline window, category and top funders.
- Narrow using what the facets tell you, not what you assumed going in.
Facets describe all matches, not just the page you are looking at, so they are a reliable map of the result set. See Filtering and narrowing results.
Grants, contracts and funders are separate
Three different databases, three different searches. Grants are what most people want; contracts are RFPs you bid on; funders are the organizations themselves. Searching the wrong one is the most common reason people conclude something “isn’t in OpenGrants.”