Exact Phrase Search |  All Words Search  |  Refining Your Search |  Search Archives

Exact Phrase search    Queries for all the characters just as they were submitted in the search form.

"George Bush" will query only for stories with the string 'George Bush' in them. Stories that contain just 'George' or 'Bush' will NOT be returned by the search. "George Bush NOT Al Gore" will query for all stories with the string 'George Bush' that do NOT contain the 'Al Gore'.

All Words search    Queries for the presence of each of the words in a story, but not in any particular order.

"George Bush" will return all the stories that have 'George' and 'Bush', although the string "George Bush" may never appear in the story.

Use commas to search for multiple word searches that contain specific full names or other multiple word phrases.

"George Bush, Al Gore" uses a comma to separate the two names. This method will query for all the stories that contain the string 'George Bush' AND the string 'Al Gore'. Stories that contain just 'Bush' or 'Al' will not be returned.

Refining your search    Use the "Month", "Year", "Section" drop down options to focus your keyword search.

The Exact Phrase Search for "Osama Bin Laden" for "All Years" is much slower than "Osama Bin Laden" for 2001 because the query only has to be concerned with the stories that occurred in 2001.

Quality over Quantity! Searches that return thousands of results will not be nearly as useful as a search that returns less than one hundred results. Include as many search words and phrases as possible to "trim off" unwanted stories. This will speed up your research as well as your searches.

"Ottawa" will return well over 50,000 stories. It would take weeks to sift through all of those results for the desired story or stories. "Ottawa City Council" will greatly reduce the quantity of results, but the quality will be much higher than the search for "Ottawa".

Words that contain less than four letters are NOT currently recognized by the search.

"Al" will return 0 results in the Exact Phrase and the All Words searches. Exact Phrase search for "Al Gore" will return all the stories that contain the string 'Al Gore', as expected.. Yet, the All Words search for "Al Gore" will only return results for "Gore" because "Al" is less than four letters long.