Search Articles
Search Tips
By understanding how the search engine works and using some simple codes, you should be able to quickly narrow your search to find most articles. Once you learn the codes, you can pinpoint the results, save time and have a greater degree of confidence that you will have found the story or stories you are looking for.
If you list multiple words in the search window, it will look for documents that have all of those words in them. You can just list the words, join them with an .and. or join them with a .&. sign. It won.t matter.
If you list multiple words but separate them by a .pipe. symbol: | (which is actually the uppercase letter on the backslash key) it will search for documents that have either one of the words or phrases: State Park | Historic Site
If you are looking for a word or phrase but do not want to include another word or phrase, you can use the .minus. symbol or the exclamation point: Madigan . Lisa
You can use parenthesis to create groups of words. The following example will find articles that have both Veto and Blagojevich in them, along with either State Park or Historic Site: Veto (State Park | Historic Site) Blagojevich.
Example: I want to find an article that quotes Frank Watson on the Vandalia Prison Farm. I think that someone from AFSCME was also quoted, but it might have just been a prison guard. I also know that it was published in 2004. I.m pretty sure it was in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but it might have been in the Belleville News Democrat. So in the search string, I enter: Frank Watson Vandalia (AFSCME | Guard) (Dispatch | Belleville) and then I select January 1, 2004 through Dec. 31, 2005 for the date range. The search yields seven results: Two articles from the Bloomington Pantagraph that quote a statement made by the Governor in Belleville; and five articles from the Post Dispatch that include the other criteria. I skim the articles and find the one I.m looking for. Or maybe, I don.t find it. Maybe it was in the Vandalia Leader Union and maybe it was in 2003 or 2005. So I change my search string to: Frank Watson Vandalia (AFSCME | Guard) (Dispatch | Leader Union). This time the search yields 22 results and I find the story I.m looking for, published in the Vandalia Union-Leader on March 5, 2004.
Summary:
explicit operator AND:
hello & world (can also be left blank)
operator OR:
hello | world
operator NOT:
hello -world
hello !world
grouping:
( hello world )
Here's an example query which uses all these operators:
( cat -dog ) | ( cat -mouse)