Tips For Improving Your Search Results:
- Simplify the search term. Fewer words are usually better than more words. One or two word searches work best. Searches like: "Shooting in Federal Prison in Tallahassee on June 21" are not going to get the results you want. A better search would be: "Florida Prison Shooting" using the "All of the words are found in the headline" setting. An even better search would be: "Prison Shooting" using the "All of the words found in the headline" setting.
- If you are searching for a persons name, try using only their last name in the search. Very few headlines include the persons first name.
- If you are searching for stories that took place in a specific city, try searching on the city name first. For example: if you are looking for headlines about an auto accident in Valdosta, Georgia, try searching using the search term "Valdosta."
- Don't use words like "in", "and", "on", "at" or "for" in your search unless you are using the "The exact phrase is found in the headline" setting and are pretty confident that there is a headline in the 1stHeadline database with those exact words. Again, fewer words are better than more when using the 1stHeadlines search. (Please note that the 1stHeadllines search will strip out these words if you use the "At least one of the words found in the headline" or the "All of the words are found in the headline" setting.)
- Don't use quote marks (") or plus marks (+) in the search. These characters will be stripped out before the search is made of the 1stHeadlines database.
- If you only want headlines returned by 1stHeadlines where the "whole" word is found in the headline, place a space at the begining of the word and at the ending of the word used in the search and use the "The exact phrase is found in the headline" setting.
- If the headlines returned by the search include headlines you are looking for but also include a lot of unrelated headlines, try changing the setting from the "At least one of the words is found in the headline" setting to the "All of the words are found in the headline" setting and redo the search. You will need to remove extra words in your search if no headlines are returned by the search. See the simplify your search example above to see how to simplify your search terms.
- If you don't get the results that you expect from your search, try simplifying or modifying the search terms and trying the search again.
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