Proximity Searching in the N&O Archive

Playing Fetch

Are you tired of retrieving more stories than you need and still not finding the story you want?

If so, we've got some great tools for you!

Proximity searching means that you can search for words near each other. With proximity searching, you can search for stories about nuclear waste and retrieve stories about nuclear waste but not retrieve stories that happen to mention nuclear families and waste baskets. For example, to search for stories on nuclear waste, the search statement nuclear w/1 waste will find all stories where the word nuclear appears within one word of the word waste.

You can also use proximity searching to find words in the same part of the story. If you want to find two words in the same paragraph or same sentence, make a guess of the number of words in a paragraph or sentence and use that number. An example of this might be the search (jail w/20 budget) and (wake w/2 county) to find stories about the budget for the jail in Wake County.

Proximity also works within fields; for instance, byline=(bob w/1 williams) will find every story with a byline that has bob within one word of williams. Note that you must use parentheses around the words you want to look for in the field.

If the order of the two words is important, then change the w/# to pre/#. For example, news pre/1 observer will find all stories that have news up to one word before observer.

You can use any number in the w/# or pre/# formula. Here are some examples of where you might use proximity searching:

Atleast# Searching

You can search for stories that mention a particular word more than once. This is most helpful when you're looking for stories about someone who is mentioned or quoted a lot. It's called the atleast# feature and with it you can find stories specifically about a topic rather than stories that just mention it once. For example, if you want stories from the archive about President Clinton, you might use the following search statement atleast20 clinton to find all the stories that have at least 20 occurrences of clinton. The rules: atleast has to be all lower-case and there cannot be any spaces between at, least, and the number -- it has to be all squished together! You can use any number you want in the atleast# search. Another example of an atleast# search would be if you wanted to see all the stories in our paper that focused on Tom Fetzer, you might search atleast40 fetzer and you would retrieve the following stories that have the word fetzer in them over forty times:

The atleast# search doesn't have to be a person's name. You can also use it to find stories on subjects. For example, if you search for the word divorce, these are some of the stories you'd get:

Those aren't very helpful if you're trying to find stories we've written about divorce. But if you refine your search and type: atleast4 divorce you'd get the following stories:

Last updated by Sperry Krueger ( skrueger@nando.com) on 3/6/96.