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Queries

Generally, queries should work as they do in Google with many of the same query parameters supported (if less completely). Query parameters include: date, site, url, and type.

Terms are AND'ed together

Like Google, queries AND terms together so the query Pope Rome will search for all documents with Pope AND Rome only.

All terms except...

To search for all documents that do not include a term, prefix the term with a minus. For example the query Pope -Rome will return search results for documents that include the term Pope but NOT the termRome.

Dates and Date Ranges

Dates are always GMT and specified using 14 digits in the form yyyymmddHHMMSS where yyyy is a 4 digit year, mm is a two digit month (zero-pad if month is single-digit), dd is date, HH is two-digit hour, MMis two-digit minute, and SS is two-digit seconds.

You cannot search by date alone. You must also supply a term as part of your query. For example:date:20051204000000 pope will return documents that include the term pope and that were archived on the 4th of December, 2005 (at midnight).

To specify date ranges, pass two dates separated by a hyphen to the date field. For example, the query date:20041204000000-20051204000000 pope will return documents that contain the term "pope" that were archived between December 4th 2004 and the same day in 2005.

Sort Order

To reorder the search results by date rather than relevance you need to add the following text to the end of the search query in your browser location: &sort=date (Later we'll add an advanced search page to preclude need of direct URL manipulation). For example, a search using the term katrina will result in an entry in the location bar of the browser looking like this: http://websearch.archive.org/collections/katrina/search.jsp?query=katrina. Append &sort=dateto sort the results by date: E.g. http://websearch.archive.org/collections/katrina/search.jsp?query=katrina&sort=date. To sort by descending date order, append &reverse=true: E.g. http://websearch.archive.org/collections/katrina/search.jsp?query=katrina&sort=date&reverse=true.

Examples

Look for pdfs by adding "url:pdf" to your query.