New Zealand Hansard

New Zealand Hansard Search

Parliamentary debates and oral questions:
September 16, 1987 to June 28, 2007

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Help with searching

Member Names

Our system copes admirably with members who change name. Try a search for speeches by 'Joy Quigley' and you will also get all the speeches she gave before her name change!

Example Searches

Search Query Description
antarctica Find documents containing the word 'antarctica'
dunedin AND auckland Find documents containing Dunedin and Auckland
title:dunedin -auckland Find documents containing the word 'Dunedin' in the title, and NOT Auckland in the body

Boolean Queries

You can use the terms AND and OR to require that multiple terms are present. For example, 
money AND honesty
will return all documents with both 'money' and 'honesty'. Both AND and OR MUST BE UPPER CASE, otherwise you'll be searching for the word 'and' and the word 'or'.

Omitted common words

So make searching more efficient, we have omitted certain common words from the index. These words are
"a" , "and" , "are" , "as" , "at" , "be" , "but" , "by" , "if" , "in" , "is" , "it" , "of" , "on" , "or" , "s" , "t" , "to" , "member", "minister", "mr", "I", "Hon"

Case Sensitivity

Searches are not case sensitive. Thus searching for accident is the same as searching for ACCidEnt.

Query Syntax

A Query is a series of clauses. A clause may be prefixed by:
  • a plus (+) or a minus (-) sign, indicating that the clause is required or prohibited respectively; or
  • a term followed by a colon, indicating the field to be searched. This enables one to construct queries which search multiple fields.
A clause may be either:
  • a term, indicating all the documents that contain this term; or
  • a nested query, enclosed in parentheses. Note that this may be used with a +/- prefix to require any of a set of terms.
Thus, in BNF, the query grammar is: 
    Query  ::= ( Clause )*
    Clause ::= ["+", "-"] [<TERM> ":"] ( <TERM> | "(" Query ")" )

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