Search improvements
62 results found
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enlarge for printing
ability to select and enlarge articles for printing
23 votes -
Newport & Market Drayton Advertiser
You have put it in the wrong county. it should be Shropshire - not isle of Wight
4 votes -
Setting search options as personal defaults.
Ideally, we should be able to set options for searching withouth having to reset every time we open up. As an historian I find it is frustrating that the default option is 'relevance' when 'date earliest' would be better. Recently, the website has taken to reverting to relevance at the drop of a hat which is frustrating in the extreme.
2 votes -
Provide more geographic search options, eg by county & by more towns
Search by place include options for small towns like Tadcaster but not a large town like Croydon, it allows search by London but not for counties.
7 votes -
Switch off boolean search operators
Advanced search should offer a way to turn off boolean search operators like AND and OR. I am searching for an exact phrase that contains the word 'and', and it gets turned into the operator AND every time, making it very tricky to search for this phrase.
11 votes -
Way better search functions if you are going to charge for your services
Make it possible to search using YOUR digital folder and image number. I have both of those items but cannot use them on this site. Pitiful. My first experience here has, so far, left me with no interest in your paid services.
6 votes -
Make drop-down list of bookmarks alphabetical
When I try to assign an existing bookmark to a new article, the drop-down list is seemingly in random order (perhaps of date created) rather than alphabetical. This leads to endless scrolling and trying to find the right one - even if I can remember if it exists - and often the creation of similar duplicate bookmarks. Can the drop-down list be made to appear alphabetically, as it does in the side bar?
5 votes -
Can I limit my search to only the London Times?
I would like to limit my search to a specific newspaper.
7 votes -
API access for members
API access for developers
16 votes -
Go directly to a particular page in a saved search
My actress ancestor has 75 pages of results , but when I go back to the saved search, I can't go straight to where I left off before (say page 54). I have to go to page 10, then 20,and so on,up to 50, then forward 4 singly, waiting ages for each page of results to load.(Tedious).We should be able to go directly to a specific page.
14 votes -
An exact search should be just that. Don't revert all capitals to lower case.
When searching for a person's name,e.g. David T Fulton, the name as a whole should be searched for. The name in the search box should remain capitalised as entered.
14 votes -
why can't we now move around the selected page anymore - it just either zooms in or out. REALLY useless and time consuming now.
why can't we navigate around a selected newspaper page anymore? Appears we can only zoom in or out which is practically useless.
32 votes -
Allow advanced search by county
In the simple search I can select from a dropdown box to search by county, which is very useful. However, advanced search only allows a search by publication place, which is often not as useful. For example, I want to use advanced search and limit it to Northamptonshire, but this appears to be impossible.
19 votes -
Search button
"Save this search" button is more prominent than the "search" button. This means more searches than intended are saved. An "Unsave searches" option might help.
3 votes -
Historic Counties
Search engine should be based on the historic counties using the post 1974 counties is confusing.
9 votes -
When doing a serach, show next to each article found whether it has already been viewed, like FindMy Past does, so any newly added entried c
When doing a search, show next to each article found whether it has already been viewed, like FindMyPast does, so any newly added articles can easily be identified.
22 votes -
Exact search
Exact search needs to actually be exact and not include variants of the searched words. For example when I search for "Downing" I don't want results for "down" and "downs" too. Case sensitivity would also be useful.
62 votes -
BETTER SEARCHES (accuracy, control & operators)
Have an advanced search like Google Advanced. When searching for 'all these words' that should mean that all of those words are in the article not just one of them.
Thanks64 votes -
Wildcards
I would love to be able to use wildcards. It's so difficult to guess what the mangled version of a name would be.
41 votesOpen - Under review ·
AdminThe British Newspaper Archive
(Head of Data Development, The British Newspaper Archive)
responded
We are looking into different ways that we could improve wildcarding at the moment
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Reward Manual Corrections to OCR-generated flaws
There is little incentive to repair obvious flaws in OCR-generated plaintext other than the satisfaction of having done so. Awarding concessionary access to those willing to contribute such exacting labours would improve the accumulated corpus for everyone and render more accurate the search function -- which depends exclusively upon the plaintext version.
32 votesOpen - Under review ·AdminThe British Newspaper Archive
(Head of Data Development, The British Newspaper Archive)
responded
We will think about this.
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