Advanced News Archive Search Tips

You can increase the accuracy and effectiveness of your searches on News archive search by adding "operators" that fine-tune your search terms. Here are the most common News archive search operators:

Date Restrict - Source Restrict - Price Restrict - Additional Operators

Date Restrict

Date restrict is an effective way to look for information related to a specific event. If you roughly know when the event took place, you can specify a time period. You can enter the date as a year (e.g., 1989), month and year (e.g., 10/1999) or a particular day (2/14/2002). For example, if you were interested in stories related to Mahatma Gandhi around the time of his death (Jan 30, 1948), you would enter:

If you would like to restrict search to all articles before a given date, you can do so by leaving the "from" date blank. If you would like to restrict to after a given date, you can do so by leaving the "to" date blank.

Source Restrict

If you'd like to look for information from a particular publication (like the Time Magazine) or information provider (like Highbeam), you can either use the [source: "name of source"] operator in the normal search box or you can use the source field on the advanced archive search page. For example, to explore what has been written in Time Magazine over the years about Saudi Arabia, you would enter:

Price Restrict

To restrict the results you see by the associated price, you can choose a price range option from the price drop-down box. Note that fees, if any, are required only to read complete articles. Clicking on results with an associated price does not incur a cost and will usually allow you to see a limited preview of the article for free.

Note that selecting "no price" in the price drop down box will return results for which we are not aware of a price. While we endeavor to identify access restrictions where possible, such identification is approximate and it is possible that we may miss some cases.

Additional Operators

News archive search supports many of the same operators that you can use in advanced searches on Google Web Search.

the "site" operator finds results from a specific site, as in [site:nytimes.com jfk];
the "+" operator makes sure your results include common words, letters or numbers that Google's search technology generally ignores, as in [charles +de gaulle];
the "-" operator excludes all results that include this search term, as in [roosevelt -theodore];
phrase search only returns results that include this exact phrase, as in ["mutiny on the bounty"];
the "OR" operator returns results that include either of your search terms, as in [nixon OR watergate];