Search

You can use the search box in the top right corner of the site to find content on this site or across all Queensland Government sites that matches your search terms.

Featured search

Featured search results may display at the top of the results page. These have been manually chosen as the most useful results for certain terms.

For example: if a user is looking for a map produced by the department, and enters the term 'map' in the search box, a featured search result will be displayed which will link to the central listing of all maps produced by the department.

Simple search

Most searches consist of a single word or list of words. For example:

  • Application form
  • jobs
  • "gene sequencing"

When you type these words into the search box you will get a list of results, with the most relevant content appearing higher in the list.

Things to note

  • In general, search tries to find documents which contain all of the query words (implicit AND).
  • Searches are case-insensitive i.e. "Cape York" and "cape york" will be treated the same.
  • Words in Search are any unbroken sequence of letters and/or numbers such as "Romeo", "1999" or "ENGN3410".
  • By default search will ignore very common stop words such as "the", "a", "of" etc.
  • Use quote characters around your query words if you want to match the exact phrase e.g. "World Music"

Advanced search

You can use different methods to broaden or narrow your search:

Simple query

This is just a simple sequence of words - described in the simple search section.

road project Cairns

Phrase operator

A phrase query can be specified by putting quote characters ("") around your query words. Using the phrase operator specifies that the component words must appear consecutively and in the order specified. Note that intervening punctuation, HTML tags etc will be ignored.

"vehicle windscreens"

Metadata search

Documents may contain metadata, including the document's author, title and when it was created. Search can query this information using the syntax:

class:query

where 'class' is the metadata class you want to query (these are a single letter defined by the administrator; standard classes include "a" for author, "t" for title).

The query:

t:road

locates documents containing the word "road" within the metadata field corresponding to the metadata class "t" (ie. the documents' title.)

Dysjunction operator

The dysjunction operator acts like an OR in a Boolean language. The results will contain any document that has at least one of the query terms. For example:

[international business] safety

A full answer to this query will include the word safety and one or more of international or business.

Negation operator

The negation operator excludes all documents that contain the negated query from the fully matching results.

train !bus

A full answer to this query will include the word train but no occurrence of the word bus. Unlike the mandatory exclusion operator (see below), partial results presented in subsequent result tiers may contain the word bus.

Mandatory exclusion operator

The mandatory exclusion operator excludes all documents that contain the negated query from all results. This is similar to the NOT operator in a Boolean language.

train -airport

A full answer to this query will include the word train but no occurrence of the word airport. Unlike the negation operator (see above), no results will contain the word airport in the indexable part of the text. The partial results are those which satisfy the mandatory constraint (no airport) but which do not contain train.

Mandatory inclusion operator

The mandatory inclusion operator will return results that all have the included terms.

projects +Brisbane

A full answer to this query will include the words projects and Brisbane. Every result will contain the word Brisbane.

Near (proximity) operator

The near operator (backquotes) requires that the query words appear, in any order, within 15 words of each other. The administrator can adjust this limit to any number of words.

'research development'

The full answer to this query will be those documents that include the word research within 15 words of development (in any order).

Truncation operator

The truncation operator matches words that contain the query term.

pro*

This example pattern matches all words starting with pro, such as projects and programs. Be careful, there are almost always more matching words than you expect.

The truncation operator can appear at the left, at the right or both, but NOT in the middle of the string.

*ran*

This example pattern matches all words containing the string ran, such as transport and Nerang

Date query

Date queries constrain the result set to documents that were modified/created during a specified time period. For date querying purposes, Search only records one date per document. It will look for the date modified, the date created and the HTTP server's last modified date (in that order).

d>1oct2009

The d>1oct2009 query returns documents that were modified/created after the 1st of October 2009.

Stemming

By default Search does not stem words either in the query or in the index. You can specify stemming by appending a cross-hatch ('#') to each query word you wish to stem. For example, the query "economic# policy#" will match:

  • economic policy
  • economics policy
  • economic policies

Complex examples

Mixed operators

The query:

t:`car* road`

mixes the following operators

  • metadata: search for document titles (t)
  • proximity: title's containing the query terms close to each other (in any order)
  • truncation: words beginning with car.
Last updated
26 March 2024