Archive searching tips

We have tried to make it as easy as possible for users to search The Tech's archives. Nevertheless, we suggest that you read through the following searching hints before starting, if only to get a feel for how best to find the stories that interest you.

Who we are

The Tech is MIT's oldest and largest newspaper, but it is also a student newspaper -- which means that we try to cover news relevant to the MIT community, especially students. This includes crime, administration changes, and student government, as well as campus arts and sporting events.

We say this because some people have been using our search engine on the assumption that we are a technical journal. This can lead to wildly unexpected results.

For example, searching for "Ethernet" will tell you how often The Tech has written about the installation of Ethernet in dormitories, not about the design, history, or implementation of Ethernet. The same can be said for nearly any technical word or phrase.

Here's a good rule of thumb: Would you be more likely to find the information you're looking for in your hometown newspaper or in Scientific American? We are much closer to the former than the latter, and while our articles do tend to cover science and technology more often than most newspapers, our focus is on the people at MIT, not their discoveries and inventions.

Case sensitivity

Our search program is case-insensitive. Which means that whether you search for "Vest" or "vest," you should get the same results.

Plurals

The WAIS indexing software we use is not very intelligent about plurals. That is, it thinks that the words "vest" and "vests" are two entirely different things. If you are looking for stories that mention a common noun, you might wish to include both the singular and plural forms of that noun in your search specification. Better yet, add the name of a group or person associated with the word for which you are searching.

Regular expressions

Our archive searching mechanism does not support regular expressions. Please let us know (write to archive@the-tech.mit.edu) if such a facility would interest you.

Narrowing the search

If a search doesn't come out exactly as you might expect, try adding one or two words to the search field. For example, searching for "prize" would give you information about Nobel prize recipients, but also about prizes mentioned in other Tech stories. Searching for "Nobel prize" would narrow things down further, and searching for "Sharp biology Nobel prize" would narrow the search down even further.

Some of the words you might wish to use in order to narrow searches are: first names, last names, and organizational names (UA, Corporation, CEG).

We have also introduced a form-based search interface, for those users with browsers that support forms. This interface allows you to narrow the search by year and section.

Multiple words

Don't use commas or other punctuation to separate words or phrases, since those will only confuse our search program. For example, if you want to find all of the stories that mention Charles Vest and Mark Wrighton, you would want to search for "Charles Vest Mark Wrighton," rather than "Charles Vest, Mark Wrighton."

Our server tries to find all of the words in a multiple-word search, so it is not necessary to add operators such as "and" and "or" between words.

Retrieving more than 40 documents

Our client and server software are currently configured to return only the 40 documents that most closely match your search specification. We hope to increase this number in the near future, but it will have to wait until we finish some other projects (such as bringing the last 10 years of The Tech onto our Web server.).

In the meantime, if you would really like to retrieve more than the 40 closest matches, we suggest that you use a WAIS client program to access our server. Our server is on port 210 of the-tech.mit.edu, and is in the file WAIS/index. Most WAIS clients allow users to specify the maximum number of documents they want returned; until our server makes such an allowance, we suggest that you use one of those servers.