tips for searching

Use the tips on this page to help you narrow your search query or to give you more comprehensive results.

To refine your search:

• Look for words with the same prefix by entering an asterisk (*) after the term. For example, type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard and so on.
• Search for all forms of a word by entering two asterisks (**) after the term. For example, type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank and sunk.
  
• Add the keyword AND to find all instances of both words used together, for example:
  
  Smith AND Jones
  
  This query finds all pages that mention both Smith and Jones.
  
• Add the keyword OR to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:
  
  Smith OR Jones
  
  This query finds all pages that mention Smith or Jones, or both.

• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want our search engine to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following:
  
  "information NEAR manager"
  
  our search engine will literally look for the complete phrase of information near manager.
  
  On the other hand, if you type the same query without the quotation marks:
  
  information NEAR manager
  
  our search engine searches all documents for the word information appearing near to the word manager.

• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, information AND manager and information NEAR manager, look for the words information and manager on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.
  
• Use the keywords AND NOT to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you wish to find all instances of surfing but not the Net, enter the following words in the search box:
  
  surfing AND NOT the Net

Additional advice:

• Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase. "Attorney-General" is the same as "attorney-general" and "aTToRneY-GeNErAl".
  
• You can search for any word except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as and other common words), which are ignored during a search.
  
• Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. For example, if you searched for "Word for Windows", the results could give you "Word for Windows" and "Word and Windows", because ‘for’ is a noise word and appears in the exception list.
  
• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;) and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
  
• To write a query that uses specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $ and (,) in a query, enclose the query in quotation marks ("…").

© Australian Government Solicitor