Website search tips

The NZVA website search supports: wildcards, exact phrase searches, Boolean operators, proximity searches and fuzzy searches.

Wildcards

? - Use the question mark to represent a single character (one and only one) at the end or within a word.
For example, to search for New Zealand or American spellings, use a query like this:

* - Use the asterisk to represent 0 to many characters within a word.
For example, to search on sulphur or sulfur, use the search:

Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.
You cannot use * as the last character of a search.

Exact phrase search

A phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes, such as "fuel cell". To retrieve only pages containing the phrase exactly as searched, place the phrase within quotes, as shown in the example below:

Note: You cannot use a wildcard inside a phrase.
The double quotes must be typed in, not pasted in from a Word or PDF document.

Boolean operators

The website search supports AND, OR, and NOT as Boolean operators. Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS. (If you enter these operators in lower case letters, the website search will search them as terms.)

AND
The AND operator matches pages where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single page. For example, to search for pages that contain "solar energy" and "heating", use the following query:

NOT
The NOT operator excludes pages that contain the term after NOT. For example, to search for pages that contain "solar energy" but not "heating", use the following query:

OR
The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching page if either of the terms exist in a page. For example, to search for pages that contain either "solar energy" or "wind power", use the following query:

Default operator
The default operator is OR. This means that if no operator is specified, the website search assumes OR.

Proximity search

The website search supports finding words that are within a specific proximity to one another. To execute a proximity search, use the tilde symbol "~" at the end of a phrase. For example, to search for "solar" and "generation" within 5 words of each other in a page, use the following search query:

Fuzzy search

A fuzzy search query returns a search on terms similar to the queried term. For example, the following query would return results on a search on 'thermic', 'thermo', 'thermal' and 'dermal':