Search improvements
170 results found
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We should be able to search only the newpapers that have been added most recently
It would be great if there was a way to search only the newspapers that have been added in the last 30 / 60 / 90 days so it's easier to find new stories.
132 votesWe have been making some background changes to the database to support this and will shortly start developing a solution.
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Improve Optical Character Recognition
The existing OCR is poor. Many words are garbled, rendering search results meaningless
132 votes -
Zooming and scrolling
Please fix the zoom and scroll features! There will be many cancellations of subscriptions! As it stands now, there is no point in looking at a newspaper page if we can't zoom and move around!
68 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 -
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 -
A preview for the search results without having to go into the full page
It would be much better if you could hover over an entry after a search and have a small preview pop up showing the context of the match to your search criteria. This would be highly effective in reducing the number of "red herring" matches that you often have to go through.
57 votes -
Mark search results I have already viewed so it is more obvious
Allow a facility for the system to "remember" which pages I have previously looked at. By ticking that page, or some other marking.
48 votesGreat suggestion. If you are signed in, the system does know somewhere what you have already viewed, so in theory this is feasible…..
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Some way of searching for two words NEAR each other rather than just both appearing or a phrase
Some search systems have commands like NEAR4 to find two words with four words of each other.
All too often a search for two words finds then in completely different parts of the page.
47 votesWe have established a way of doing this through our search technology. Next steps are to start designing a user interface.
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make bookmarked pages visible in results lists
It would be VERY helpful if previously bookmarked
entries were flagged up in search results (tags are already shown).At the moment there is no easy way of doing multiple overlapping searches and accumulating a "superset" of all the items you found, or telling if a new search has simply found an entry that a previous search had already found.
44 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 votesWe are looking into different ways that we could improve wildcarding at the moment
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Make bookmarked articles sortable
It would be really useful to be able to sort bookmarked articles in the same way you can search results. Like a lot of researchers, I bookmark a lot of articles for future reference and find it frustrating that they are saved in the order you bookmarked them with no way of re-sorting them. The search function for bookmarked articles is very useful, but it would be great to be able to sort alphabetically and by article date as well.
35 votes -
Go back to same place on results page when an article has been reviewed
when weve viewed an article and return to results page pls can you go back to the last position we were on in the page so we dont have to keep scrolling down all the time esp as some results are very similar
34 votesThis is a good suggestion – we will add it to the Future development list.
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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 -
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 votesWe will think about this.
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Wildcard Search
We need a better search facility - the current transcriptions are often horrifically off the mark. It might even help to have a wildcard option to try and incorporate all the random letters supposedly appearing in the middle of names.
30 votes -
Email me when you add new articles that match what I've searched for
Like Genes Reunited's Hot Matches. I want to be told when you add something useful for me, so I don't have to try to find it myself.
29 votesWe will take a look a the feasibility of this – it is quite an Engineering challenge but we already have some pilot projects underway that may help with this.
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Identifying and downloading/printing an article
When will we get the promised facility to download one article instead of the whole page? The Times digital archive has offered this for a long time. Screenshot is delicate and long winded as each part of a long article has to be captured separately.
27 votes -
Search within page / edition being viewed
Search within page.
25 votes -
enlarge for printing
ability to select and enlarge articles for printing
23 votes -
Saved pages need to retain the position on the page (which was the original subject of a search)
I have many saved pages, organised them by person in support of family history. However when I retrieve the saved page, there is no 'pointer' directly to the article on the page which contains their reference (i.e. the original search result), resulting in a need to read through a whole page again to re-discover. I'm sure it never used to be like this?
23 votes
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