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Searching Africa News Search Archive Simple Search and the Search String Field The simple search option and the search string of the advance search option support the following operators: + A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each story returned. - A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any story returned. By default (when neither plus nor minus is specified) the word is optional, but the stories that contain it will be rated higher. < > These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a story. The < operator decreases the contribution and the > operator increases it. See the example below. ( ) Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. ~ A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the story relevance to be negative. It's useful for marking noise words. A story that contains such a word will be rated lower than others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator. * An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word, not prepended. " The phrase, that is enclosed in double quotes ", matches only stories that contain this phrase literally, as it was typed. Examples: Nigeria elections find articles that contain at least one of these words. +Nigeria +elections ... both words. +Nigeria elections ... word ``Nigeria'', but rank it higher if it also contain ``elections''. +Nigeria -elections ... word ``Nigeria'' but not ``elections''. +Nigeria+(>elections <oil) ... ``Nigeria'' and ``elections'', or ``Nigeria'' and ``oil'' (in any order), but rank ``Nigeria elections'' higher than ``Nigeria oil''. Niger* ... ``Niger'', ``Nigeria'', and ``Nigerian''. "some words" ... ``some words of wisdom'', but not ``some noise words''. Other Fields The following fields may be used to further customize your search. Note that no field is required, although at leas an entry must be provided for at least one field. Source: The article source is the publisher of the article. This is the name of the newspaper, journal, magazine, etc. as displayed on our site. Click here for available sources. Dates: Dates must be entered in Year-Month-Day format. (example: 2003-01-25 for January 25, 2003) Region: region must be specified as North, South, East, West, Horn of Africa, or Great Lakes. Click here for a list of countries in each region. Type: The type of story is specified by Review, Interview, report, or article. Note that most of our stories are articles. There are a few interviews. This field, like all other fields is optional.
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