Archive Website of the UK government

Narrowing your search

You can use the filters on the left hand side of the search results to include or exclude keywords and site sections. For more details, see the main 'Help with searching Cross & Stitch' page.

• Help with searching Cross & Stitch

How to use advanced search

With the advanced search feature, you can build a complex query term to find specific information.

Click the 'Advanced search' link next to the search box on the results page. The advanced search tools will appear in a pop-up window if your browser has JavaScript enabled. If you don't have JavaScript enabled, you'll see an advanced search form on a new page instead.

When you click on one of the options in the pop-up window, a special search query will appear in the search box. You'll just need to fill in what you're looking for, replacing 'Enter your word here' or 'Enter your phrase here', or the date 'DD/MM/YYYY' (meaning day/month/year).

You can combine several advanced search options to form a very precise search query. See the 'Advanced search' pop-up window for the full list.

You don't have to use the JavaScript-enabled search tools - you can just type your advanced search query straight into the standard search box.

Examples of advanced search

Exact phrase

To find pages that contain a specific sequence of words, put the words in double quotation marks: "Enter your phrase here".

At least one of the words

To search for one or more words, use 'OR' between the words, and put brackets around them. For example: (self assessment OR tax return) deadlines.

Without the words

To look for pages that don't contain certain words, you can either use 'NOT' or put the minus sign '-' in front of the word.

If you click 'Excluded words' in the pop-up window, it will add '-Enter your word here' into the search box. This means the word won't appear on pages in your results.

Before doing this, you need to type in the words you do want to search for. For example, 'pension –state' will search for all the pages that contain the word 'pension' but don't contain the word 'state' – that is, pages about pensions but not about the State Pension.

Date range

You can search for pages published during a certain date range. In the pop-up window, click on 'Date' for an exact date, or 'Search after a date' and/or 'Search before a date'.

For example, to find all pages about tax that have been published or updated since the beginning of the 2011-12 tax year, you would search for 'tax after:05/04/2011'.

Title search

If you click 'Title search' in the pop-up window, it will add 'title:(Enter your word here)' into the search box. This will look for pages with your word or words in the page title.