Advanced search help

The OSCE search engine quickly and efficiently searches all OSCE webpages, documents, press releases, features, events and photos available on the OSCE public website.

Search fields

"Search for" - By default, your search will be performed on the entire OSCE website. You can deselect any boxes for the types of content you wish to exclude from your search.

"All of these words" - Search for one or more words, choosing to match only the start of  the word(s), the exact word(s) or any part of the word(s). Common words like "and", "the" and "a" are automatically excluded from your search. Words of 2 or less characters are also automatically excluded.

"None of these words" - Exclude words in your search that match the start of the word(s), the exact word(s) or any part of the word(s).

"The exact phrase" - Search for an exact phrase. Please consider alternate spellings of the words in your phrase or variations of the phrase itself.

"Source" - Limit your search to a particular source, which could be an OSCE Institution, Unit or Field Mission. If you do not select anything, your search will include all OSCE sources.

"Region" - Limit your search to a particular region, one of South-Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia or Western Europe and North America. If you do not select anything, your search will include all regions.

"Activity" - Limit your search by OSCE activity, such as anti-trafficking, arms control, border management and so on. If you do not select anything, your search will include all activities.

"Date" - Limit your search to a particular year, month and/or day. If you do not select  anything, your search will include all available items regardless of date.

"Display results" - Choose to display the titles and details of your results, or only the titles. You can also select the number of results you would like displayed on each search results page. If you do not select anything, your search will return 10 results per page.

More tips

1. The search is not case sensitive. For example, if you search for "HOOP", you will get results for "Hoop".

2. To narrow your search, you can combine the use of word or exact phrase searching with all or some of the additional search parameters "Source", "Region", "Activity" and "Date". You can also use word or exact phrase searching independently or one or more search parameters independently.

For example, if you would like to search for 2003 documents on OSCE anti-trafficking activities in Eastern Europe, deselect all boxes at the top except "Documents", select "Eastern Europe" in the "Region" list, select "Anti-trafficking" in the "Activities" list and then click the "START SEARCH" button.

3. Make your search words as specific as possible. For example, if you are searching for  documents from the former Chairman-in-Office Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, search for "de Hoop Scheffer" rather than "Chairman-in-Office".

4. Common words such as "and" and "the" as well as words with only one or two characters are excluded automatically from the word search.