Search Help

Search Help

Here are some basic tips to help you find your way around our website..

Simple Search

On the top left corner of every page is the orange search box. To search for stories about a particular place or topic, type a word or words into this box, and click on the ‘search’ button. The search engine will then look through all the content on the website and display a list of all the stories that include the word/s in your search.

It doesn't matter what order you type the words into the search box. For example, searching for ‘history Kaitaia’ will give you the same results as searching for ‘Kaitaia history’. The search engine won’t know if you have misspelled a word, so please try and spell it correctly. As new stories are added to the website, they will automatically be included in the system, so you should be able to search for them straight away.

The search does not include websites that are linked to this website.

Advanced Search

If you click on ‘Advanced Search’ in the search box, it opens an extended search box which allows you to define your search. You can search individual data fields, including place, place description, story description, author / owner, family / whanau name, date, and language. You can also search just for text, images or audio.

This is useful if you are looking for stories from a particular author or user, or a particular type of story e.g. historical, memoir, oral recordings etc. When you are in the Advanced Search, you need to use the Search button at the bottom of this box. To close the Advanced Search, click the small ‘x’ symbol in the top right-hand corner of the search box.

Search Tips

1. The basic search function can be used to search for anything in the website, including places and people. If you would like to define your search, the ‘Advanced Search’ is a good option
2. you receive more results in your search than you would like to look through, do a new search with a more specific request. For example, instead of searching for ‘Whangarei’, try searching for ‘Whangarei Kamo’
3. Please don't use special characters like !@#$%^&*,.?/'":;. Usually the search engine will ignore them, but sometimes they cause the search to return the wrong results, or to fail
4. You don’t need to include ‘joining’ words in your search, such as ‘and’ and ‘or’. These will be treated as search words, so may affect your search results
5. For words made up of more than one part (e.g. Mount Manaia) you need to enter these words separately. If you type them together (e.g. MountManaia) your search will not return stories about Mount Manaia.
6. When you receive the search results, you can then click on any of the stories to see their full details

Search problems?

If your search is still not finding text that you know is there, please contact us, with details of your search and the information you are trying to find, so we can try and solve the problem.