How to use this Search Form
This form enables a search through all Victoria Government Gazettes from 1998 to the most recent Gazette published.
Simple or Advanced Search
The simple and advanced versions are based on different methods of searching.
The simple search engine reads every word in the PDF file and is therefore able to give very accurate results.
The advanced search engine allows you to also restrict by broader categories such as Act, Date Range and Gazette Type.
Because these criteria are connected to the Gazette as a whole and not to individual listings inside a Gazette,
the results returned may not give any page numbers or relevance and, instead, just list all of the pages as hyperlinks.
Once a hyperlink is opened then a search can be performed on the PDF file itself.
Relevance for Keyword Searches
The search engine uses proximity architecture to perform its searching.
The relevance is a numeric representation of how near the terms you have searched on were to each other in the database.
Results with a relevance of zero simply means the terms were found, but not very close to each other.
Acts and/or Gazettes
If you wish to search by a particular Act simply make a selection from the select boxes under the Advanced Seach options.
Tips
Click in the Acts select box and type the first letter of the Act you want to search on to go to that section of the list.
Type the same letter again to move through that section one record at a time.
Keywords
Words or phrases enclosed in double quotes will be matched exactly.
e.g. "road closure" will return records matching the whole phrase "road closure" but not those with only "road" or "closure".
Use of Symbols
Most symbols are escaped from the search data being searched and the search criteria you enter.
This is done to ensure consistent results across the many different character sets that exist.
Gazettes prior to 1998 :
Gazettes prior to 1998 are available only in Bound Volumes (hardcopy) at the following addresses.
Victoria Government Gazette
Ground Floor, Building 8
658 Church Street
Richmond 3121
Office hours are 8.30am - 5.30am, Monday to Friday.
The Gazettes are free to browse, however a fee of $1.70 cents applies for a photocopy of each page.
Gazettes from 1851 to 1996 can also be viewed on a database at;
State Library
Swanston Street
Melbourne
Telephone 8664 7000
gazette.slv.vic.gov.au
Public Records Office
Reading Room, 99 Shiel Street
North Melbourne
Telephone 8636 2000
Noisewords
Certain words known as noisewords are filtered out of search querys as they generally do not contribute to the final search results.
Words such as the, of, and, for, then, has, or, no, in, if, this etc. are an example of this.
If you are performing a search and have words that could possibly be a noiseword (you will be alerted if your search query contains noisewords and no exact matches)
but you want results that match these words place them in double quotes.
For example, searching on section 3 would filter out the number 3 as it is a noiseword, so searching for "section 3" (note the double quotes around the search term)
will return results that match 'section 3'.
