Search Help

This site has been provided with an advanced search engine that will allow you to accurately search and locate required information, including the ability to refine a search to find specific information.

The functionality detailed below allows users to tailor the search criteria, and narrow the number of results returned until the required information has been found. Searches can be continually refined, with each refinement storing the previous search criteria so that there is no need to re-enter data.  This does mean that you will need to use the clear form function before performing new searches.

Overview

This website’s search application can retrieve both Welsh and English content. The search will be performed in the language of the site from which the search function was accessed.   

Apostrophes
If apostrophes are included in the text, the search will still run and any apostrophes within the search terms will be included within the search.

Advanced Search Options

Keywords

With all of the words
This search box should be used to enter any key words that must appear in the returned document(s).  These can be in any order within the document.

With the exact phrase
This field should be used to search for the exact phrase within a document or page. One or more phrases may be entered in this field and each should be enclosed by quotation marks, for example "fox hunting" "hare coursing". When more than one phrase is entered, the search will return results containing both phrases. The exact phrase will need to be a duplication of the text that users expect to find on the web page in order for the search engine to be successful.

With at least one of the words
This search box should be used to enter any key words that may appear in the returned document(s). This allows users to specify more key words than are actually needed in the results, because not all words are required. This function can help when there is uncertainty regarding the exact words within a piece of text.

Without the words
This can only be used with the ANY or ALL options, above. For example, if  a number of words are entered in the ALL search box, you can also enter words in the ‘without the words’ box to filter out documents that contain all of the ALL words and none of the ‘without’ words.

Collections

Collections

The collections option lets you filter searches for content that has been classified using the main areas of this website. These collections allow a refined search to be performed, but do not require a great deal of knowledge of the actual document type.  

If you select a Committee and click the more button, the full list of Committees for that Assembly will be displayed, allowing you to select one or more of these committees.

Please note that the Document Collections and the Document Categories are classed as an ‘either’ statement.  This means that if a selection is made within both areas, both areas will be searched independently and results will be returned if a result is located within either.

Document Category

This section of the Advanced Search contains a selection of options that allow you to restrict searches to certain types of business information held on the site.

Please note that the Document Collections and the Document Categories are classed as an ‘either’ statement. This means that if a selection is made within both areas, both areas will be searched independently and results will be returned if a result is located within either.

Document Types

This option allows you to search for content in a specific format. The options available within this section will depend on the format information is held in.  Nearly all historical business documents are held within a PDF format, with all new documents and pages from the third Assembly being held within an html format.

Date

This facility can be used to restrict searches by date. The date used within the search is the date that the content item was last updated. However, there may be instances where a document relating to the First Assembly was updated during the period of the Second Assembly. As such, this document will not appear within the ‘correct’ First Assembly period. For these types of searches it is suggested that the Category option is used.

There are two main date options available:

Search documents from
The field defines the period from the day that the document was updated or published.  The options within this field are: 7, 14, 30, 90 days or 1 year

Define a date period
This selection allows the defining of a date period by entering a ‘from’ and ‘to’ date.  

Results displayed

Results Per page

Define the number of results that should be displayed on a page.  The options available are: 5, 10, 15, 20 and 50, with the default being 10.

Hide descriptions in results

Due to the amount of information that can be provided within the results page, this option allows the result description to be hidden on the page so that only the title of the document is displayed. This function is useful if you have selected to view a large number of results per page within the previous option.

Language

Search documents in

This option allows users to enter a word and search either the English version or the Welsh version of the site. The majority of information in the site will be available in both English and Welsh, but there are some instances when this will not be the case –for example  papers presented to Committees by external organisations.

Stemming

The search performed will use the stemming functionality – this means that it extends a search to cover grammatical variations on a word. For example, a search for ‘fish’ would also find ‘fishing’. A search for ‘applied’ would also find ‘applying’, ‘applies’, and ‘apply’.

Power Search Options

The following four options are only available when the power search option has been selected.  These options have not been displayed on the Advanced search due to the complexity of the functionality

Fuzzy Match

This function will return results that are predicted to be relevant to the search criteria entered, even when the terms used in the query do not appear anywhere in the matched document.

With fuzzy matching the algorithm is designed to find documents containing terms related to the terms used in the query. The assumption is that related terms are likely to have the same core and differ at the beginning and/or end. A search for "matching", for example, would also return documents containing ‘match’, ‘matched’ etc. It will, however, also return documents containing unrelated words like ‘matchbox’ etc.

Proximity Based

In proximity searching the user can specify a maximum distance between keywords. For example, in a search for "guns roses" with a maximum distance of 2, documents containing the following are considered matches:
- guns and roses
- guns 'n roses
- more guns than roses
While these are not:
- …used guns, but in the next example André used roses
- Guns blazed in the rose garden

Soundex Based

If the spelling of a keyword is not quite accurate, but phonetically correct, a Soundex keyword search returns results that contain the keyword and phonetically similar keywords (using a Soundex algorithm).

Synonym Based

Synonym searching finds synonyms of a word that you include within a search request. For example, a search for ‘fast’ would also find ‘quickly’.

Results Page

There are functions available on the results page that allow you to further ‘interrogate’ the results, including the ability to locate the information in the alternative language (Welsh or English).  

Did you mean to search for
The ‘did you mean to search for’ spelling suggestion will offer alternative search terms at the top of the results page if one or more search terms have not been found or if they are not very common. Clicking on the link will re-run the search using the suggested search word/terms.

Sort Results by

In date order (most recent entry first)
This option will return a list of relevant results, with the most recent first.

In order of relevance
This will order your results with the most relevant document at the top. Relevance is a rating of how well the contents of each document in the result set match the search terms and conditions selected to perform the search. When determining relevance the search engine takes into account the following:

• Distribution of the terms across all documents, so common terms will have a lower weighting than less common search terms
• The number of times the search terms occur within the documents, so documents containing the search terms a number of times will be ranked higher than those which contain one or a few instances

Documents with the highest search term relevancy and frequency will be displayed first.

Show results in:

This function allows you to re-run the search within the alternative language version of the site, so if a required result was not displayed on the English version of the site, users can run the query against the Welsh version. Please note that the original word/term will be used and will not be translated.

Result available in:

The language in which the result is available is displayed next to the link title per result, and shows En for results where the content is available in English, and Cy for results where the content is available in Welsh.