Advanced search help

Use this search facility to find information and services sourced from business.gov.au and other government websites.

1. Search Terms
The Search for text field and options are explained below:

To narrow your search, enter words into a combination of these text boxes, eg
Search for: business tax
Excluding: GST
will return documents with business and tax but will exclude any documents with GST.

2. Search Locations
Select the location by checking the box corresponding to your state or territory.

Tip: To include all relevant results to your location, select both federal and your state or territory.

3. Search Options
About these topics : select a business topic from the dropdown list.
In these categories: select the category from the dropdown list.
Results per page: select the desired number of results to be shown per page.

4. Submit Search
Click Search to submit your search.

Topic Search

The topic search tool is located towards the bottom of business topic pages, in a section which contains the text: Can’t find what you are looking for? Search for more information on this topic:

Use the drop-down box to select a location, and click Go.

Council Search

The council search tool is located towards the bottom of aggregate pages, in a section which contains the text Can’t find what you are looking for? Search for more information on this topic:

Use the drop-down boxes to first select a state or territory, then a Council. Click Go to initiate the search.

Search Results

The search results page includes the following four elements:

• the search criteria used and the number of search results
• the relative position of the current results;
• a list of search results; and 
• links to other results pages.

Each business.gov.au search result includes:

• a relevance indicator
• the title of the result hyperlinked to the resource
• a brief description of the resource, the name of the source agency, and its jurisdiction.

Relevance
Results will be ordered in terms of 'Relevance' which is the degree of match between your search terms and the contents of the web page.

Concept searching
Your results may return documents that do not contain the words that you used in your search. This is because the search engine has determined that these documents are about the same concept that you searched on.

Stemming
The search automatically includes stems or common variants of your search terms. For example, a search term of tax will automatically match taxing, taxation, taxed , etc.

Wildcards
The search supports * as a wildcard to extend searches. Note that at least two regular characters must appear in combination with the * wildcard. For example, tax* matches tax, taxes, taxpayer, taxidermy, etc.

Noise Words
Noise words are common words such as and, the, they etc. These words are ignored when searching except when they are included as part of an exact phrase.

Case insensitive
The search fields are not case sensitive. For example, gst will find gst, and GST.

Refining your search

1. Too many results
Select Advanced search to refine your search and extend the search criteria by adding additional search terms or selecting a business topic.

Tip: A combination of search terms, location and business topic will generally give you the best results.

2. Too few results
Broaden the search criteria by, for example, removing a search term or selecting All States and All Industries.

3. Can’t find it!
If you can't find what you are looking for, contact us to request assistance.