Database Guides: Chronicling America

The basic search box is designated as the blue Search Pages tab and is found on many of the pages of the site. Basic search options are limited to state, time period, and key words located near each other. The basic search returns all supported languages.

For basic searches, results listed first are most likely to be relevant to your search. Results will appear higher in the list when they contain

• exact matches of your search terms
• more of your search terms
• repeated search terms
• search terms that occur near each other

Your searches will yield better results if you keep the following points in mind:

• Common words such as and, not, and the are ignored by the search engine.
• Case of letters is ignored. For example, Civil and civil are treated the same.
• Diacritic characters (accent marks, in non-English text) and other special characters produce inaccurate results, so plain (unaccented) letters should be substituted for letters with diacritics.

Chronicling America's search engine utilizes language-specific dictionaries to include word variants for your search terms. This is often called stemming. For example, the search term house, when stemmed in English, would also return words like houses and housing.