HELPFUL HINTS AND TIPS TO SEARCH THE PARLIAMENTARY WEBSITE

Search Results and Search within Results

The results screen is in tabular format and and can be sorted in various ways. The target document can be viewed in PDF reader, text-only, or as text-snippets with hits. If too many hits are returned, then results are divided into manageable page-sized chunks. As most of our documents are in PDF format we recommend that you use PDF reader to view our documents.
The results can then be filtered using facets.
Expand the ‘Search Fields box’ to adjust your original search criteria to better refine your results

General Search – Required Fields

Select the area of the site you wish to search or search the entire website
Select the sort by method for the returned results 

General Search – Optional Fields

The optional field searches can be used to perform specific advanced searches.
All These words

Will locate all documents that contain all of these words anywhere within the document, these words are anded together. i.e. ‘police dog’ will run the query ‘police AND dog’ locating all documents that contain both the words police and dog somewhere within the document.

This exact phase

If you enter more than one word using 'exact phrase' option, the search engine will consider it as a contiguous phrase; for example, a search string - queue hospital - may not find any hits, meaning that text queue hospital was not found. However, if your intention was to look for documents where both words 'queue' and 'hospital' occurred, then use 'logic based' option and input both of these words in 'All of these words' field

At least one of these words

Will locate all documents that contain all of the words anywhere within the document, these words will be ored together. i.e. ‘police water’ will return all documents that contain ‘police’ or ‘water’ anywhere within the document.

Custom Query

Instead of looking for a word, try looking for the relevant phrase. For example, if you are looking for the phrase "winter of discontent", a search for the single word winter will fetch a lot of redundant hits. However, be mindful of the fact that common small words - the, it, of, by and so on - are sensed but not matched; so in our example, winter of discontent is equivalent to meaningless phrases like winter by discontent. Moreover, some reserved words - and, or, not, except, in, to, after, before - have special logical meaning for the search engine and will appear to give spurious results. For example, the phrase clean and green means 'instances where words clean as well as green exists in the same document' . Often times such issues can be worked around; for example, with the search string –  “(clean) (green)”~2 - meaning instances where 'green' occurs within two words of 'clean' in a document', which is far more accurate.

Boolean Operators

Using Boolean operators between words allows search to include or not include words. The following is a list of operators that can be used in queries.
AND (&&)

Locates documents which contain both of the entered words or phrases. E.g. record AND sales

OR (||)

Locates documents which contain any one of the entered words or phrases. E.g. team leader OR supervisor

NOT 

Locates documents which contain the first word or phrase, but not the second. E.g. record NOT expense

Other Operators

Quotes (" ")

Where multiple words are enclosed in quotes, those words must appear as an exact phrase.

Single character wildcard

Using the single character wildcard (question mark, ?) can be used to return results with one character in place of the question mark. 
ground? Will return results with any words matching ground and any letter after ground e.g. grounds

Multiple character wildcard

Using the multiple character wildcard (asterisk, *) will return results with zero or more characters in place of the asterisk. 
ground* will return results with any words matching ground and any letters after ground e.g. ground, grounds, groundwork, groundwater, grounded, groundbreaking

Fuzzy search

Using the fuzzy search returns results containing words that are either an exact match or are similar without being an absolute match. By default, up to two differences are allowed.
(lever~) will return results that include clever, lower, seven, letter. But would exclude the words closer, flower which are more than 2 differences from the original.
To change the “fuzziness” of your search, you can specify how many differences are allowed. E.g. lever~1 would only return clever but not clover.

Proximity Search

Using a proximity search you can locate words within a number of words counts of each other.
"(word1) (word2) (word3)"~10
Each of the words is an exact match appearing within the number of words of each other. As few as two words can be searched in this manner.


Advanced Search

Go back to Advanced Search