Tips for searching

What will the search function find?

Searches are executed across the ‘subject’, ‘title’ and ‘description’ metadata fields as well as the text of HTML pages and attachments. (Metadata is descriptive information about information, that allows web pages to be searched.)

The Search results page contains the results from searching through all of the files (HTML, PDF, Word, Powerpoint) that are available from the NSW Industrial Relations website.

Searches

• are not case sensitive if all the letters are the same case
  for example: ‘WAGES’ and ‘wages’ will return the same results but ‘Wages’ will perform a case sensitive search
• perform synonymous term searching
  for example: a search on ‘wage’ will return content with ‘wage’ or ‘salary’ assigned as a subject
• ignore punctuation
  for example: O'Connell and OConnell will return the same results
• allow the use of asterisks (*) to broaden a search
  for example: trade* will find ‘trading’, ‘trademark registration’ and ‘tradesperson’
• perform stemming on single word terms by default, that is, searches are automatically expanded to include the word and its variations
  for example: ‘pay’ will return content containing ‘pay’ and ‘payment’
• can be narrowed using quotation marks (“”) to disable stemming
  for example:“build” would only return results with the word ‘build’ and not ‘building’
• treat the search term entered as a phrase
  for example: ‘online complaint’ will not match ‘online wages complaint’
• allow fuzzy searching which is executed by using the syntax ‘search term’
  for example: ‘Smythe’ will return content containing ‘Smith’

More than one term or phrase

When searching for more than one term or phrase separate the words or phrases with a semicolon, for example:

• youth; debt
• shop; rate

This will perform a search on documents that have BOTH terms contained in them.

Search by Subject

This is an additional search tool which displays subjects that might be useful to the searcher based on the original search request. It appears in the left side navigation panel.

A 'search by subject' returns all documents where the selected word has been assigned as a subject.