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.<.p>
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.
The new glimpse search program can be either case sensitive or case insensitive. You can specify this in the forms interface; in the simple interface, it is by default case insensitive. This means that whether you search for "Vest" or "vest," you should get the same results.
The indexing software we use 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.
Our new archive search software (glimpse) does support regular expressions, but we're not sure if it's implemented correctly. Look for more information here in the next few weeks.
Enter as many search targets as you wish, separated by spaces or commas. Then, choose whether you want to search for occurences of any of the words or all of the words in the lines of a file.