Help

Search tips

How the search works

To search consumer.org.nz, enter the words or phrases you're interested in and hit the "go" button.

A search for vacuum cleaners, for example, will look for documents containing both the words vacuum and cleaner.

If there are no documents that contain all the words you have entered, then documents that contain one or more of the search words are displayed. If this occurs, the following message appears:

• "There were no documents that contained all of the words in your query. These results contain some of the words."

What search terms should you use?

Use terms that are as specific as possible so you get more accurate search results.

Example:

• toasters instead of appliances

The more words you put in, the more precise your search. However, be aware that you also limit the number of results by doing this and so may not see results that would be useful to you.

Search suggestions are displayed at the top and bottom of each page. You can click on these to perform a search on the suggested term.

Example:

• Search phrase: vacuum
• Search suggestions: vacuum cleaners | dishwashers | electricity ...

How to find an exact phrase?

Put double quotation marks around search words to find exact phrases. This limits your results to where that exact phrase appears, rather than including where the words in the phrase appear separately.

Example:

• "Fair Trading Act"

Wildcard/stem searching

By typing an asterisk * at the end of a word, you can search for multiple forms of the word.

Example:

• iron* will find iron, irons, ironing

Display of search results

The results are displayed in order of relevance (with the most relevant first).

You can re-sort the results by date - just click the "Sort by date" link at the top right hand side of the results page. This will display the most recently published or updated material first.

Limiting your search results

Once you have done a search, you can use the Refine results function to limit the results displayed to one type of site content - for example, recalls or news items.

Spelling correction

If a word isn't recognised, an alternative spelling may be suggested.

Example:

• Search phrase: coofee maker
• Spelling suggestion: Did you mean: coffee maker

Search is case insensitive

You can use lower or upper case in your search.

• Example: a search for vacuum, Vacuum or VACUUM will find the same results