Search Help

General

The Parliament's search facility is powered by a Google Search Appliance.  Please see Google's own help pages for further details about how to improve your search and maximise your results:

• Basic search help
• More advanced search help 

Keywords

Enter your search terms in the Keywords box.  The search is not case sensitive.  A search for forth road bridge is the same as a search for Forth Road Bridge.

The search automatically includes each word so you don’t need to include AND.  You can use Boolean terms such as OR to refine your search. For example Debating or Chamber will bring back pages including either Debating or Chamber, or both. 

You can also use a minus sign (-) before a word you wish to exclude, but this should be used with care in case you accidentally discard results that would be useful.  The minus sign must have a space in front of it, for example -sport so that the search knows that it is not a hyphenated word.  You can use this for more than one word within a search, for example -report -minutes.

If you want to search for an exact phrase put it within quotation marks, for example “finance committee".

Certain words such as the, and, and of are known as stop words and are usually ignored by the search.

Select areas of the site to search

You can refine your search to only include one area of the site to help bring back more accurate results.  These are:

• Current Committees
• Previous Committees
• Bills
• MSPs
• Education
• News

You can select more than one area, for example you can search both current and previous committees.

Results Per Page

Choose how many results you would like to see displayed.

Order by

You can choose to order your results by relevance or date.  Your results will be ranked by relevance by default but you may wish to order them by date, particularkt if you are searching for a series, such as committee reports from 2011. Date is generally the date a page or document was published, but this may vary depending on format and the way that documents have been tagged.  If you are looking for something with a particular date we suggest you add the date to your keyword terms to ensure that you will find what you are looking for more quickly.