How to search the archives
The Post-Dispatch archives offer two levels of searching - Simple Search and Advanced Search.

A Simple Search offers one box in which to enter your search terms or keywords. Use and, or, or not to combine words. A simple search looks for your keywords in the entire story, including the headline.
A simple search works well if you are using uncommon search terms or topics that don't retrieve a lot of articles. If your search retrieves too many articles, you might want to use the Advanced Search option to make your search more specific.

An Advanced Search provides three boxes for search terms and allows you to specify where in a story each search term should appear. You can limit your search to the headline, the byline (writer's name), or the lead (first two paragraphs of the story.)

Both kinds of searches allow you to limit your search by date as well as specify how many stories should be displayed and in what order.

How to use Simple Search

Step 1: Enter your search terms in the box provided. A search term can be either a word or a phrase. If your search consists of several words or phrases, they must be combined using and, or, or not:

and: Both words or phrases connected with and must appear in the story.
Example: endangered species and birds

or: At least one word or phrase connected with or appears in the story.
Example: train or railroad

not: Stories which contain words following not will be excluded from your results.
The not connector should always be placed at the end of your search statement.
Use not only when you are certain a word or phrase could not appear in a story you want to find. In general, it's best to use and and or for searching.
Example: cardinals and birds not baseball
Example: st. louis cardinals not game

Step 2: Searching personal names: If you are unsure whether a person uses a middle initial or a middle name, enter /2 between the person's first and last name. The /2 will retrieve the first name when it appears within 16 characters of the last name.
Example: To search for a name that was published in the paper as William Franklin Robertson, you could enter william /2 robertson. This would retrieve references published as William Robertson, William F. Robertson and William Franklin Robertson.

Example: To search for William Rehnquist, enter:
william /2 rehnquist. His name is normally published as William H. Rehnquist.

Step 3: Select a date range to limit your search to a specific time period. Use the arrow at the right-hand side of the box to scroll through available date options; click on the desired option to select it. The choices range from "Within 30 days" to "All Years." The default is the three most current years.
You can limit your search to a specific day or month by including the following in the search box:

date(4-15-99) and mark mcgwire will limit your search to stories about Mark McGwire that were published on April 15, 1999.
date(3-99) and forest park will limit your search to stories including the phrase Forest Park that were published in March of 1999.

Step 4: Select the order in which you want your results to display. You can select from the following choices:

Most Recent First (the default)
Oldest First
Frequency of search terms (Stories with the most search terms display first.)

Step 5: Select how many story summaries to retrieve at one time. You can choose to display 25, 50, 100, or 200 stories at one time.

NOTE: Limiting your display to 25 stories does not prevent you from displaying additional stories. If your search finds more than 25 stories, there will be a button at the end of your search results allowing you to display the next 25 stories found. You will be able to do this until all the stories matching your search criteria have been displayed.

Step 6: Click the Search button to submit your search. Clicking Reset clears all the boxes and allows you to enter a new search.

Step 7: Unless there is a problem with your search, a brief display will be returned with summaries of stories meeting your search criteria. This display will consist of the headline, byline, publication date, section, page, edition, number of words and the first 50 words of the story. From this list, you can:

View an entire story by clicking on the story link. There is a $2.95 charge to view the full text of a story. See Set Up an Account for more details.

Modify your original search by clicking on the BACK button

Display additional stories

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How to use Advanced Search
The Advanced Search screen allows you to select up to three search terms and specify where in a story each must appear. Search terms are combined using connectors and, or, or not which are selected by clicking on buttons between each search box.

Step One: Type in keywords and connectors
Decide on up to three search words or phrases. Three are not required, but you need at least one search term.

Example: trees
Example: forest park
Example: christopher /2 bond

a) Enter a search term in the first box.
b) Click on the "appearing" box to select where in the story this term must appear. Options include:

Anywhere in story: Searches the complete text of the story,
including edition, section, byline, headline, keywords and body. This is the default selection.

In headline: Searches the headline (or title) of the story. Use this narrow category carefully, remembering that headlines often rely on last names, nicknames, abbreviations and acronyms. People are rarely identified by their full name in a headline.

In headline or first 2 paragraphs (lead): Specifies that the term must appear in either the headline or the first two paragraphs. This could be a good choice when you want a list of very relevant stories or when you need to reduce the number of stories returned.

In the byline: Searches the name of the reporter(s) who wrote the story.

c) Select a connector (and, or, not) by clicking on the appropriate button. The connector acts on the search terms in the boxes above and below it and determines how these two terms will be combined.

and: Both words or phrases connected with and must appear in the story.
Example: endangered species and birds

or: At least one word or phrase connected with or appears in the story.
Example: train or railroad

not: Stories which contain words following not will be excluded from your results. The not connector should always be placed at the end of your search statement.
Example: cardinals not baseball

d) Enter a search term in the second box, then select where in the story it must appear. If you are planning to include a third term, select a CONNECTOR, then enter the third term, and finally select where in the story it must appear.

Step Two: Select a date range
Select desired options from the select boxes below. Use the arrows at the right-hand side of the boxes to scroll through available options; click on desired option to select it. Multiple options can be selected in the DATE box by holding down the Ctrl key (Windows) or the command key (Macs) when clicking to select.

DATE: Specifies the time period to search. You may choose from a menu of pre-selected date range choices or you can specify your own choice of date range. For the pre-selected time periods the choices range from "Last 30 Days" to "All Years." The default is the current year.
To create your own date range, click on the radio button to the left of the "From:" and "To:"
Then select the month, date, and year from the drop down menus for both the begin date and the end date.

Step Three: Tell us how many search results you want per page
DISPLAY MATCHES: Specifies how many stories will be displayed. The fewer stories displayed, the faster the search. The Default is 25 matches.

Step Four: Tell us how you want your search results viewed
DISPLAY: Specifies the order in which you want your results to display:
Most Recent First [the default]
Oldest First
Frequency of search term (Stories with the most search terms display first.)

Step Five: Click the Search button at the bottom of the screen to submit your search. Clicking Clear resets or clears all the boxes and allows you to enter a new search.

Step Six: Unless there is a problem with your search, a brief display will be returned with stories meeting your search criteria. From this list, you can:

View an entire story by clicking on the story link.

Modify your original search by clicking on the BACK button

Click on the View Additional Stories button to view brief displays of the next set of stories. The number of stories retrieved at one time is determined by the number you chose in step four.

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Searching Tips
Here are some general tips to help you build effective searches:

Using Connectors: You need to connect multiple search words or phrases with and, or or not.

For example,
rolling stones or mick jagger
will return stories where either Rolling Stones or Mick Jagger appear in the story.
rolling stones and mick jagger
will return stories where both phrases appear anywhere in the story.

To search for a specific story: To find a story which you know was published in the paper, simply type a few distinctive terms from the story into the search box, and use the and connector to combine these terms.
Suppose you wanted to find a story by Carolyn Tuft headlined:

DNA Evidence from '78 murders was destroyed
Gregory Bowman sought testing to prove innocence
Test wasn't available 20 years ago

No need to type in lots of words. The following search will do the trick:
tuft and bowman and dna

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To Research a Topic
Selecting Search Terms: Identify the subject you are interested in. Try to narrow it as much as possible. For instance, are you interested generally in the ocean? Or are you really trying to find out about fish and endangered species? Or kelp beds as habitats? The more specific you can be, the more on target the stories you retrieve will be. Choose search terms which a writer would have been likely to use in a story.

Narrowing Your Search Results: Searches can retrieve up to three thousand stories. If this happens to you, try: Selecting a more specific date, specifying a section to search (Advanced Search only), adding additional terms to your search using the and connector, using Advanced Search to specify that your search terms appear in the headline and first two paragraphs (or narrower still, just in the headline).

Here are some tips that only apply in certain circumstances. Refer to them as needed.

Case: Case is ignored. Terms can be entered in all lower case, all upper case or mixed case.

Combining Connectors: Connectors in a search statement process in a defined order. Words enclosed in quotation marks are searched first. Then the system searches for terms connected by or, then and, and finally not. In resolving the search statement

buzz westfall or clarence harmon and metrolink

The system searches first retrieves stories containing either Buzz Westfall or Clarence Harmon are retrieved. These are checked to make sure they include the term MetroLink.
Most of the time this order is appropriate and natural, and you won't need to think about how you combine connectors. If you want to change this order, you can always override it by using parentheses, since connectors within parentheses are processed first.

Plurals and Possessives: The system automatically searches for the singular, plural and possessive forms of a word. Searching for bird will also retrieve stories containing bird's or birds. Irregular plurals such as child (children), foreign plurals
and words ending in -us, -is, -ux or -ix, are not retrieved automatically. See Word Stemming below for information on how to search for these.

Punctuation: Periods, hyphens, apostrophes, and ampersands (see next entry) are searchable and can be included in your search statements. Other punctuation marks are ignored and should not be included when searching; if you try to use them, an error message will result. Simply drop the punctuation mark and retain the space. Input/output becomes input output.

Ampersand (&): The system reserves this symbol for use as the and connector.
To search for expressions containing an ampersand, you must substitute a plus sign (+). For S&L, you would search s+l.

Stopwords: These are very common words (usually prepositions or articles) which have not been included in the index. It's okay to include them in your search as the system will just ignore them. But generally it's more efficient to avoid common terms that don't have any descriptive content. The stopwords are:
after, also, an, as, be, because, before, between, by, for, from, ever, if, in, into, of, other, out, since, such, than, that, the, there, these, this, those, under, upon, when, where, whether, which, with, within, without.

Word Stemming: Use the exclamation point (!) to search for irregular plurals or variant endings of a word stem.
Example: employ! This retrieves stories which include any words with the stem employ plus any endings, such as employee, employer, employing, or employment, etc.

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Viewing, Printing and Saving Stories
Stories are printed or saved to disk (captured or downloaded) the same way you save or print other pages from your browser.

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