Newspape Archive

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:42:20 -0500, Grant Barrett
<gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG> wrote:

>On Jan 10, 2005, at 12:16, Mullins, Bill wrote:
>> I just picked up a subscription to NewspaperArchive, and I've got a
>> couple questions for those of you who are "power users".
>> 1. Is there any way to put the search results into chronological order?
>
>No.
>
>> 2. Sometimes it will tell me how many results I have, sometimes it
>> won't. Any ideas why this varies?
>
>Because it is pathetic and lame. If it doesn't give you a count, just
>assume the total is "more than I want to look through page by page" and
>see if you can revise your search to produce fewer results.

I think that it will tell you how many results you have if you do a search
without any date restrictions.  Any search restricted to a range of years
(showing up in the URL as <+AND+range:...>) does not give a count,
regardless of how many results there are.

Since you can't get the search results in chronological order, I usually
just end up fiddling with the date range until I get a time period with a
small number of results.  Then I hope I get lucky with the OCR actually
returning legitimate matches.  (I'm starting to figure out which letters
are frequently misrecognized as other letters, e.g., "l" for "i", "o" or
"c" for "e", etc., so that a search on "movies" could be extended to
"movles", "movios", "movlos", "movics", "movlcs", etc.)


--Ben Zimmer