Search tips

If you have any problems, questions, or exciting discoveries to share, try the Historic Hansard discussion forum!

Search types

There are two search types:

• Speeches: search the full text of individual speeches; returns one result per speech (and speaker).
• Debates: search the titles of debates or questions; returns one result per debate (which may contain many speeches).

Most of the time you'll want to search for speeches so that you can get into the content quickly. But the debate search is useful if, for example, you want to track the passage of particular bills through Parliament.

Full text search

By default the search index assumes you want an 'OR' between all your keywords. So if you search Hansard speeches for chinese women you'll get back speeches that contain either 'chinese' or 'women'. You can control this by using boolean operators, for example:

• use chinese +women to search for speeches that contain both words
• use chinese +-question to search for debate titles that include 'chinese' but not 'question'
• use (allowance pension) +mother to search for either 'allowance' or 'pension' plus 'mother'

There's a certain amount of fuzziness built-in to match things like plurals and alternate spellings. If you want to search for an exact phrase, or a particular form of a word, use double quotes:

• use "women's rights" to find the exact phrase
• use "woman" +rights to find 'woman' (but not women) and 'rights'

For a bit of extra fuzziness you can use wildcard characters:

• use chin* to match any word beginning with 'chin', including 'China', 'Chinese', and 'Chinamen'

For more precision you can use proximity searches to set a maximum distance between your keywords:

• use "chinese naturalisation"~5 to find the words 'chinese' and 'naturalisation' withing five words of each other

Filters

You can filter results by:

• Date: define a start date, and end date, or a date range
• House: House of Reps, Senate or both
• Parliament
• Speaker: select a person to return only their speeches

You can also use House, Parliament, or Speaker without supplying any keywords. For example you could search for all speeches by Alfred Deakin during the first parliament.

Downloads

You can download the results of your search as a CSV formatted file for further analysis. You should be able to open this file in any spreadsheet program.

• Construct and refine your search as normal, until you have set of results you want to download.
• Scroll to the bottom of the results page, and click on the Download all results as a CSV file button.
• Depending on the size of the result set it can take a while to generate the CSV file. For this reason, download requests are placed in a queue for processing. You will be emailed when your file is ready.
• Enter your email in the box.
• Click the Create CSV button.
• Once your email arrives, just click on the supplied link and the download should start immediately. This link will expire after 24 hours.