The simple search, appearing first on the Home page, covers Assembly election results for the years 1982, 1987 and 1991 and pages on the main site CyberJournalist. You can enter one or more words on the search box. Click search and the results would be displayed in a simple manner. The second search box, powered by Atomz, will cover the rest of the database. The display will have features for sorting by date and hiding summaries. Note that the Sort by Date may not have much use as the sorting is by the date of upload.

The Advanced Search covers the Assembly Election Data for 1991, 1996 and 2001 and the Lok Sabha results from Kerala for 1977-2004.

You can search for candidates and constituencies using this search facility. If you do not know the exact name of a constituency either go through the index file or keep the sound alike match feature ticked. This feature would find you a constituency such as Trivandrum even if you type Trivendrum. Note that official constituency names still use the anglicised place names. If you are searching for a constituency, you need use only the constituency name. Adding words such as assembly and constituency may result in the search engine returning all the files as these words occur in almost every file (if you have not chosen all words option).

If you want to focus on names such as K. Karunakaran (excluding all other Karunakarans), you may keep the name within quotes. Eg. "A. K. Antony" (If you are doing a broad search, just Karunakaran or Antony will do). This will not work perfectly, but would help to narrow down the search to some extent. Keep the sound alike match box unticked. Alternatively, the radio button for exact phrase can be ticked to limit the search results.

When names are used without initials (Eg. Sivadasa Menon), you can chose all words to narrow down the search. If you tick any word, the results would include all Menons and those with names starting with Sivadasa.

If you want to find out all the women candidates who contested the 1996 elections, try searching for "Ms."
In case of Lok Sabha results, you can get a separate listing.

There are also a number of other options for controlling and limiting the output.  You may leave the default values as such if you are not an advanced user. The dated option and sort by date would not have much value as it refers to the date on which the files were uploaded to the server. (It does not look for any election dates).