How search works

What search covers

Search in CouncilPapers runs across every agenda item and minute item for your council. It searches the following content:

Search automatically applies prefix matching and typo tolerance

• searching for the start of a word will also find longer words that begin with it, and minor misspellings are still matched.

Confidential items

Confidential items are indexed and will appear in search results. They are flagged as confidential in the results and are visible to logged-in councillors and staff. They are not visible to the public.

Boilerplate items

Items marked as Exclude from Search Results when the agenda was built - typically standing items such as Apologies for Absence and Declarations of Interest - are excluded from results by default.

This keeps everyday searches relevant. However, if you need to include boilerplate items in a search, tick Include Boilerplate in the search filters to override the default.

Non-active and unpublished agendas

By default, search only returns results from the active, published agenda for each meeting. Two checkboxes in the search filters allow you to extend this:

• Include non-active agendas - includes results from older versions of agendas that are no longer the live version
• Include unpublished agendas - includes results from agendas that have not yet been committed and published

These are unticked by default to keep results focused on current, published content.

Who can search

Search is available to councillors when logged in to the Councillor App, and to staff from the admin area. It is not available on the public portal.

Tags and search

Tags are indexed and searchable as text. Searching for a planning reference or project name will find items tagged with that text even if the term does not appear in the item text itself.

See Tagging for more on how tags work.