Search Help

First Search

The first time you conduct a search, you must specify an area of the site to search. Although site-wide search is available as an option, we recommend restricting your query to a specific area. Information on this site reflects the very broad nature business before the Parliament, and unless you target your search carefully, results are likely to appear irrelevant.

Search Preferences and Settings

These values from your last search are retained on subsequent searches:*

• the area of the site you searched;
• if your last search was restricted to just one House, that House;
• if your last search was restricted to a particular type of House Paper, that type of House Paper;
• if your last search was restricted to former Members rather than current Members, that type of Member;
• whether or not word variations are to be matched;
• result list settings: number of documents per page, and the sort order.

If you do not want to retain these values from your last search, untick the "Retain preferences" checkbox. You can clear your stored preferences at any time by clicking on the "reset" link next to that checkbox.

*Preferences are stored by your browser using cookies. If your browser is not cookie-enabled or if you switch computers, preferences are not retained.

Matching Word Variations

Only the exact words you specify are matched, unless you tick the "Match word variations" checkbox. Often you may intend word variations to be included, for example you may enter only 'test' when you mean to include 'tests', 'testing', 'tested', etc. In those cases be sure to specify "Match word variations".

Query Syntax

As well as words and phrases, your query may include the following operators to search based on the absence of words, or the position of words relative to each other.

Precedence of operators

Where a query contains several operators of the same precedence, the search engine processes from left to right. Use brackets to explicitly control the order of precedence. For example:

• car allowance // manager OR salesperson is interpreted as ((car allowance) // manager) OR salesperson, that is, documents containing 'salesperson' will be returned, plus those containing 'car allowance' in the same paragraph as 'manager'.
• To change the query to "find 'car allowance' in the same paragraph as 'manager' or 'salesperson' ", specify: car allowance // (manager OR salesperson).

Case, Punctuation, Reserved and Common Words

Searches are not case-sensitive. Operators appear in upper case on this page purely for convenience.

Punctuation is ignored; a search will bring up matching punctuated and unpunctuated words and phrases.

Reserved words are all those used as search operators - eg, AND, OR, NOT, etc. To search for the existence of a reserved a word in a document, enclose it in quotes (ie "AND").

Common words such as I, THE, IT, IS are ignored in searches.