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Search Help

You may use the Department Search page to:

• Search all of the Department's websites.
• Search the specific site from where you began your search. For example, if you were in the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) website when you decided to search, you will be able to restrict your search to the ATSB website alone.

Simple Searches

Input your search terms -- keywords, etc. -- into the search textbox and click on the Search button to the right.

The search will then retrieve all web pages that contain these terms and rank them in terms of their relevance score.  This takes into account the relative rarity of the search terms, the frequency with which they occur in the document and the length of the document.

Please note:

• Search terms can appear anywhere in the retrieved document and in any order.
• The search terms do not have to be adjacent in the retrieved document.
• If there are more than five search terms, fully-matching results need not necessarily contain occurrences of all query words: instead, documents are ranked by their relevance score.
• Stop-words - extremely common terms like "it" or "and" or 'the" - are excluded from searches unless the query contains fewer than three non-stopwords, e.g. "the Union".
• Searches are not case sensitive, so 'IT' is not distinguished from 'it'.

Refining Your Search

You may find that a simple search retrieves a long list of pages, but the information you're looking for is either buried a long way from the top, or not there at all.

To overcome this, you can refine our search:

• You can punctuate our query to require that the two words are adjacent in the order specified, i.e. as a phrase, e.g. "school of education".
• You may want to use truncated terms -- e.g. to look for all words that begin with 'comput'.
• You may want to exclude terms, or you may want to use alternative terms.

All this is provided for by the Funnelback Query Language, and here are the basic details. Please note that the punctuation is significant. That means that if, for example, you are searching for a phrase, you must include the inverted commas when you input the search terms.

Phrase	"Department of Infrastructure"	Searches for the exact phrase Department of Infrastructure, all words adjacent and in the order specified.
Truncation	econom* *onics *matic*	Searches for all words beginning with econom, ending with onics or including matic.
Alternatives (i.e. OR logic)	[road media] releases	Searches for the word releases plus either road or media.
Exclusion (NOT logic)	road -rail (NB: no space between the minus sign and the following word)	Searches for documents that contain the word road but not rail.