• Check the dates of your search. Select a longer time span to find more stories.
• Are you sure which paper it was in? Try searching both newspapers.
• Do you have the correct spelling?
  
• Try putting in fewer search criteria, or use OR between the terms to widen your search.
  
• It's best to use all lower case.

Search Terms
What is a search term?
A "term" is a word or words that you type into the search box. Separate them with commas, AND, OR, or NOT. Several words or phrases can be used for one search, but must be separated in one of the following ways:

COMMA
If search terms are separated by a comma, the archive will find stories with any of the search terms. So if you search for gross national product, national savings it will find all articles with the phrases gross national product and/or national savings.

AND
A search for gross national product AND national savings will find only articles that include both those terms.

OR
This acts like a comma and finds stories with any one of the search terms.

NOT
A search for duck not cricket will find stories about the bird variety of ducks but not the cricketing kind.
A search for duck and pond not cricket also will find stories about the bird variety of duck.

If the word and/or/not is part of the search term, enclose it in double quotes. So bacon "and" eggs will search for the phrase bacon and eggs rather than the separate terms bacon and eggs.

When mixing AND as well as OR as part of your search term, the AND takes precedence over the OR.

Upper Case, Lower Case
Using all lower case or all upper case letters will find both upper and lower case spellings of your search term. So planet and PLANET find the same stories.

Using upper and lower case together, as in Planet, finds only instances of a combination of upper and lower case. The command <case> inserted before your search term finds acronyms such as NATO and MORI, e.g. NATO.

Double Quotes
Searching for shoot also finds shoots and shooting. Searching for "shoot" in double quotes finds only shoot.

Wild cards
Two wild cards can be used: asterisk (*) or question mark (?).
An asterisk takes the place of any number of characters: trac*y would find tracy, tracey, tractability, tracery or any other word which begins with trac and ends with y and has any number of letters in between.

A question mark takes the place of a specific number of characters:
ba??n would find bacon, basin, baton, baden, or any other word which begins with ba and ends with n and has only two letters in between.

Punctuation
A search for good cop bad cop will find combinations such as the following:
good cop/bad cop; good cop-bad cop; good cop, bad cop; good-cop bad-cop.

By specifying the punctuation of a phrase, the search is narrowed and finds the specific search term (including the specified punctuation).

Apostrophes
Do not use any. If you use an apostrophe in a search term (O'Chee or Expo '88, for example), it won't help you find what you're looking for. Use Chee or Expo 88 instead.

Search fields explained
Select publication
The archive defaults to searching both The Sun and The News of the World. The pull-down menu enables you to search the individual newspapers.

Keywords
This is where you type in your search terms.

Date range
By default, the archive will search back 30 days. You can change this by clicking the buttons next to your preferred option. The further you go back, the longer the search will take.

Specified search
You can specify a date or narrow it down by filling in the From box (and the To box if required) in the format dd/mm/yy (e.g. 12/08/99).

Maximum results in list
The archive lists up to 800 results. Refine your search to lower the number of hits.
You can refine a search in the following ways:

Search by
Headline: You can use this field if you are looking for a specific story and can remember a word from the headline.

Byline: This field will search for the author's name. Use the surname only. Section:This will order search results by section, e.g. Travel or Money.

Caption: Many articles are published with photographs. Often the words in the caption under the photo are included with the article.

Editions: A newspaper is published in various editions. This will order search results by edition.

Page: You can use this field if you remember the page an article was on. This is best used in conjunction with a specific date.

Sort by
Relevance: This will order your search results according to the number of "hits" or mentions of the search term(s). The archive will then default to displaying the articles with the greatest number of hits first.

Ascending/Descending:
The archive presents the most recent articles first by default. You can change this Descending order of articles (i.e. most recent, or most relevant at top) to Ascending. The search will then show the oldest or least relevant articles first.

Back Issues
This search option allows you to call up a list of all articles published on a specific date.