Help – Site search

Tips to improve your Site search results:

• Choosing your search words
• Use the tax year
• Use terms commonly used by the CRA
• Use synonyms
• Common words
• Use lowercase text
• Multinational characters
• Including or excluding words
• If results are not what you expected
• Forms only available in paper format

Choosing your search words

Be as specific as possible when entering your search terms. For example, "automobile expenses" will bring more relevant results than "automobile." The search engine will add the word "and" and go search for documents that contain both "automobile" and "expenses."

Care must be used when using the word "and." In many cases the word "and" is part of a title or subject. For example, "goods and services tax." You can tell the search engine to search for the phrase by clicking on the "this phrase" radio button. This tells the search engine to search for documents that contain the phrase "goods and services tax." You can also enclose your search words with double quotation marks, for example, "goods and services tax" instead of goods and services tax. Alternatively, you can type in your search term as "goods+services+tax." The search engine treats the plus (+) symbol as an "AND."

Use the tax year

If you enter "RRSP" and the tax year "2001," the search engine will search for relevant documents that contain "RRSP" and tax year "2001."

Use terms commonly used by the CRA

You will get more relevant search results when you use the search words "automobile expenses" or "motor vehicle expenses" than you will if you use the words "car expenses."

Use synonyms

Try using synonyms to improve your search results. For example, you will get different results for the search words "car," "automobile," or "motor vehicle."

Common words

Common words such as "the," "a," and "an" are found on all of our pages. To improve your search results, remove the common word and resubmit your search.

Use lowercase text

When you use lowercase text the search engine finds both upper and lowercase results. When you use upper case text the search engine finds only upper case.

Multinational characters

If you do not type letters with the accents or the diacritic marks in the search box, the search engine will find all related words and not only the word you are seeking. For example, if you type "eleve," Web pages will be returned that contain the words "élevé," "élève," etc. If you type "élève," the search will return pages that contain only "élève."

Including or excluding words

To ensure that a specific word is always included in your search topic, place the plus (+) symbol before the key word in the search box. To ensure that a specific word is always excluded from your search topic, place a minus (-) symbol before the keyword in the search box. For example, to find Canadian rail and ship transportation excluding air, try "rails+ship+canadian-air."

If results are not what you expected

If your search brings back results which may not be relevant to your search, go to our Forms and Publication page where you can navigate by audience or by subject.

You can also click on the appropriate link below for frequently requested CRA forms and publications.

Tax

• Frequently requested forms – Individuals
• Frequently requested publications – Individuals

• Frequently requested forms – Business
• Frequently requested publications – Business

Forms only available in paper format

Some forms, such as remittance, payments, and specialized T1 forms, cannot be downloaded from our Web site because of technology used in these forms. For a complete list, see our Only available in paper format Web page.