Advanced Search Query Guide

A story in the Media Cloud Online News Archive represents a unique URL with content and other associated computed and extracted metadata. This includes:

{ "id": "f6cdbcd7be5ecc60728831ee52fab75131e575972ec848f4441fd71b581099ae", "media_name": "theblaze.com", "media_url": "theblaze.com", "title": "Florida man arrested after trying to travel across Atlantic in 'human-powered hamster wheel'", "publish_date": "2023-09-09", "url": "https://www.theblaze.com/news/florida-man-arrested-after-trying-to-travel-across-atlantic-in-human-powered-hamster-wheel", "language": "en", "indexed_date": "2024-02-21 11:05:03.305199", “text”: “...”, }

Query Feature

Media Cloud

Wayback Machine

Single character wildcard?

"wom?n" works to match things like "women" or "woman"

Multiple character wildcard

"wom*n" or "wom*" works to match things like "women" or "woman"

Hyphens

"two-spirit" needs to be in double quotes

AND/OR capitalization

need to be capitalized

Search titles only

specify the column by searching something like "article_title: biden"

specify the column by searching something like "title: biden"

Searching for an exact phrase

use double quotes to match an exact phrase like "unhoused person"

Regular expressions

not supported

"fuzzy" queries

query for "Biden~" to match any slight mispellings of his name ("Bidan", "Bidden", etc)

not supported

Proximity search

"woman killed"~10 will find stories where those words are within 10 words of each other

Default search

terms next to each other without boolean operators are assumed to be AND'd ("monkey banana" is "monkey AND banana")

Negation

prefix the term with NOT or - to indicate you want matches that do not include the term; such as "gaza NOT hamas"

Language filter

add a "language:en" clause with the two-letter code (ISO 639-1)

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