Search the Ministry of Consumer Affairs Website

Search Help Tips

1. Be as specific as possible with your search terms

This website contains hundreds of consumer-related pages. As such, you need to be as specific as possible when entering your search term, as it is likely that your search terms will appear in many places within the website.

Example:

Searching on “contracts” will give you 232 results. However you may specifically want to find out about your rights when cancelling a contract, so including “cancelling” in your search terms will provide more accurate and useful results. For tips on searching on multiple search terms, use search operators (see below for more information).

2. Select the Website section to search in

Narrow down your search by defining a specific website section to search within (if relevant). For example, if you are a consumer and looking for information about vehicle insurance, enter your search term and use the dropdown list to select “Information for Consumers” and then search. This will reduce the number of results considerably, and rank the most relevant pages highest.

3. Do not use [ENTER]

Do not use the [ENTER] key to submit your search, always select the [Search] button. The [ENTER] key will not give you any search results.

4. Use operators to narrow down your search

You can increase the accuracy of your search by adding search operators that fine-tune your keywords, such as AND, OR and NOT.

AND

The most frequently used operator is “AND”. This will enable you to find only those pages that have all your search terms in it. To use this, put each of your keywords in quote marks, with “and” between them.

Example 1:

Normally you might search on refunding a gift voucher

However, if you enter your search term as “refunding” and “gift voucher”

You will reduce your search results from 176 to 2, and greatly increase the likelihood of finding what you need.

Example 2:

Instead of search on faulty goods

Try searching on “faulty” and “goods”

Again, if you perform this search within the Information for Consumers section, you will reduce your search results from 79 to 29.

AND NOT

If you want to search on a term but wish to exclude another term, you can use “AND NOT”.

Example:

You wish to search on “hire”, but you are finding that you are getting mostly pages about “hire purchase” (as there is a lot of information about this).

To search on “hire” and exclude “hire purchase” information, enter your search terms as follows:

"hire" and not "purchase"

In this example, search results are reduced from 123 to 13.

Tips on using operators:

• Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.
• You can search for any keyword except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search unless used as an operator as in the above example
• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.