How to use our website search

The search function on our website is an easy way to quickly find the information you are looking for.

The links you see in your search will depend on the words you type into the search box.

No matter what you're looking for, start with a short, simple search. If you want to find information on paying your Council Tax, for instance, you could search for ‘pay council tax’. A person would understand your query better if you asked a question and included more words, such as, “How do I pay my council tax?”. You will, however, get better results from our search engine if you only include the key words, which in this case are ‘pay’, ‘council’ and ‘tax’.

When you decide what words to put in the search box, try words that are likely to appear on the site you're looking for. For example, instead of saying my head hurts, say headache, because that’s the word a medical site uses.

Google's spell checker automatically searches for the most common spelling of a given word, whether or not you spell it correctly. For example, if you mis-spell recycling as ‘recycing’, the search engine will still show you results for ‘recycling’. 

The same applies to grammar, such as hyphens and capitalisation. A search for ‘weston super mare’, for example, will produce the same results as a search for ‘Weston-super-Mare’.

Our search engine will automatically display the most relevant results at the top of the page. If you wanted to see the most recent results instead, simply click on 'Relevance' in the grey box and change it to 'Date. This will order results based on when they were published on our website, with the most recent page at the top.