Web Archive Search Help
The search tool used to provide full-text access to the Library's Web archive collection is powered by the open-source
search engine, Nutch.
Search results are ranked by relevance according to several factors including:
- how often the query terms appear in the page relative to how often they appear throughout the collection
- how often the query terms appear in the page compared to the length of the page
- whether the query terms appear in the url
- whether the query terms appear in the hostname
You can execute advanced searches using some of the following tricks:
- Boolean search default is "and"
- Example if you enter tax reform in the search field, the engine will search for tax and reform, not just tax reform as a
phrase. However, both words must be present in the page to end up in your results list!
- Use a minus sign with a term you do not want searched.
- Limit searches by identifying specific file types
- Site specific searching limits results to one web site
- tax reform site: http://www.state.sd.us/governor/
- Date Range searching requires full date range and search terms:
- year/month/day/time-year/month/day/time [search term]
(ie. 20051204000000-20051206000000 tax, will return all documents from Dec 4 2005- Dec 6 2005 that contain the search
term tax)
- To reorder the search results by date(instead of relevance)-You need to add the following text to the end of the search query
in your browser window: &sort=date
- To sort by descending date order: &sort=date&reverse=true
If you still have questions about how to refine and improve your search results, please contact LaVera Rose, the Library's Web
archiving project manager, at
LaVera.Rose@state.sd.us.