Search down under

The Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel in Australia has chosen an advanced search solution for accessing legislation on its Web site. Queensland legislation is presented in six different collections of PDFs, where citizens can search across huge repositories of PDFs to find the information they want.

The Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel chose ISYS:web 7 from ISYS Search Software to power the site.

"We required a search engine that could serve as the technology centerpiece of our site," says Simon Bourne, acting IT manager of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel. "For research purposes, we needed the ability to search and locate phrases with a particular meaning in legislation, while not finding other instances of those terms outside of that context. This meant searching every word, and with more than 21,000 documents comprising 250 million words, we knew the solution needed to be highly scalable and accurate."

The software offers PDF search capabilities and an Outline view, which displays a text version of a PDF with key terms highlighted and in context. The solution also features hit highlighting in native PDF files and takes users directly to the first hit, enabling them to navigate from hit to hit, ISYS reports in a recent press release.