Search improvements
62 results found
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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 -
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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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 -
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 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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enlarge for printing
ability to select and enlarge articles for printing
23 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 -
Bookmarks are placed in Folders, but you can't go to a particular folder and search
You can place bookmarks into 'Folders', but you can't actually search these folders individually. A page showcasing your various folders would be handy.
21 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 -
Improve the search terms so that exact search mean exact search
I fail to understand the utter hopelessness of the Exact Search function. A small example - I search for Alfred King, and get any number of King Alfreds. Incredibly irritating and makes the site pointless. And surely easily remedied.
19 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 -
export searches
Export newpaper, date, article title, abstract, group saved in, researcher comments into an .xls or .csv file for further analysis. I am a citizen reseasrcher not at an institution.
11 votes -
semantic search which recognises surnames, places etc
The use of "" does not filter to surname only i.e. Brakes search comes up with all references to brakes.
11 votesOpen - Being developed ·AdminThe British Newspaper Archive
(Head of Data Development, The British Newspaper Archive)
responded
We have had our first presentation back from one of the universities and we are prototyping an early version of this. However, this will be a long project!
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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 -
Browse from issue to issue within full screen
Browse from issue to issue, page to page, within full screen, as if you were -er - reading a newspaper. (A radical idea for software designers perhaps, but not for newspaper readers). The John Rylands Manchester Observer online does this without a hitch.
9 votes -
9 votes
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Historic Counties
Search engine should be based on the historic counties using the post 1974 counties is confusing.
9 votes
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