Internet Search Help

To locate documents on the Department of Justice Internet site, type the words you are looking for in the search box.

By default, the search engine will search the entire Justice site for documents that match your keywords. You can also limit the search to locate only FAQ documents, documents that are part of the NewsRoom, or documents that are part of the Youth Justice site. Simply select the appropriate option.

Finding a specific phrase

When you enter more than one word in the search box, the search engine treats the words as a phrase: it looks for documents in which the words appear together. It will also locate closely related words (stem variations), as long as they appear together.

Example:

learning plan will also locate documents that contain the phrase learning plans.

If you want to limit your search to a specific phrase, without locating any stem variations, put double quotation marks around the phrase.

Example:

"resource centre" will not locate documents containing resource centres or resources center.

Finding variations of a word

The search engine will automatically locate documents that contain stem variations of the keywords you have entered.

Example:

learn will also locate learns and learning.

To locate all possible endings of a keyword, including those the search engine does not recognize as stem variations, type * at the end of the word.

Example:

tax* will locate taxes, taxable, and taxation.

Upper and lower case

If you enter your search terms in all lower case (learning) or all upper case (LEARNING), the search engine will locate all variants of the terms, whether they are in upper case, lower case, or a combination (LeArNiNg). However, if you enter your search terms in a combination of upper and lower case (Learning), the search engine will only locate exact matches.

Including all words in your search

To ensure that all of your search terms appear in your results (but not necessarily as a phrase), separate them with "and," "<and>," or a comma (,).

Excluding search terms

To exclude a term from your search, type "not" or "<not>" in front of it.

Example:

learning not plan will find results that include the word learning but do not include the word plan.

Other search tips

To find documents that include any of your search terms (but not necessarily all of them), separate your search terms with "or" or "<or>".

To find documents in which your search terms are in close proximity (but not necessarily a phrase) separate them with "<near>". The results will be ranked according to how close together the terms are: the nearer the terms are to each other, the closer to the top the result will appear.

You can create more advanced searches using parentheses to tell the search engine in which order to use each command.

Example:

(learning OR teaching) AND plan will locate documents that include the word plan as well as either learning or teaching (but not necessarily both).