BBC SPORT | Help: Searching our archive

Wednesday, 19 March 2003, 17:42 GMT

Help: Searching our archive

We have preserved in a huge archive all the news we have published since our site opened in November 1997.

There are two ways of accessing the archive:

Fast search
using the SEARCH box on the top right hand corner of our news pages.
Advanced search
click on the link in the search results page for more tips and options.

Search terms

Because we produce thousands of stories every week, you will probably need to use more than one search word.

Put in as many words as you like. The more words you enter, the better your results

You can enter keywords but you will get better results by entering longer free text, e.g. "the night that Liverpool won the Uefa Cup against Alaves". You can use mixed case or lower case (Uefa Cup or uefa cup or UEFA Cup)
You will normally want the most relevant results first, but if you are searching the latest information on a particular story (e.g. recent BBC stories on Michael Schumacher) choose the search by date option on the results page.

Advanced use

Putting double quotes around specific phrases of names may help, e.g. "Steve McClaren".
You can use Boolean search terms AND, OR, NEAR and NOT but they must be in upper case. For example "Mark AND Waugh NOT Steve" will come up with stories about Mark Waugh that do not mention his brother Steve.
Use * as a wildcard. Austral* will find stories about Australia, Australians, etc.

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