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Using the Search Facility

Search and Advanced Search for the CSO web site are available on the right hand side of the header on each page, and will enable you to search documents throughout the site.

Type your keywords and press GO, or click on the link to the advanced search to conduct a more refined search. The more detailed your query, the more relevant are your results.

Search Tips

› Simple tips for improving search results
› Using Advanced Search

Simple Tips For Improving Search Results


Broad terms return a broad array of results - terms such as Agriculture will return a lot of results. If you want more specific information, refine your search by adding additional terms e.g. Census of Agriculture; Agriculture Prices; etc.

Spelling - ensure you have the correct spelling of a word. Mistyping and misspelling can occur accidentally and greatly affect search results.

Different words - if you are looking for school statistics and you are not happy with the results try using education statistics. The search engine will try to match synonyms as best as possible but trying your search with an alternative may improve your results.

Case sensitivity - only words or phrases containing an upper case character will be treated as case sensitive. A search on "usa" will match "Usa", "USA", and "usA", while the term "USA" matches only its uppercase version.

Use of asterisk (*) - The asterisk is a powerful search tool, but has some limitations. It cannot span words - that is, the query "imrov*earch" would not match the heading of this paragraph - and it can represent at most four letters or numbers. To avoid overly broad searches, the asterisk can only be used in words or phrases which have at least three alpha-numeric characters. A search for "th*" would be ignored.

Using Advanced Search

Using the Advanced option of Search will assist in finding specific information and narrowing the scope of your search request. The Advanced option is available from the link in the top banner area on all web pages next to the Search field.