The archives contain all articles published on ireland.com, including The Irish Times online, Breaking News, Sports, Jobs, Property, Motors, Business and Special news and event sites.

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Search weighting:
If you wish, you can give a higher weighting to more important words by placing a plus (+) sign in front of them. Similarly, less desired terms are preceded by a minus (-) sign; you can use the minus sign to remove all or most items containing a specific word. For example, to search for documents about manchester united but not about champions you would specify the following search string:

+manchester +united -champions

Entering Boolean queries:
You can enter a query in Boolean form into the text box, to search for document items with specific combinations of words. You can use the following operators between words in a Boolean query:

AND OR NOT

NOT is used before each word you wish to specifically exclude. A NOT can only be used as part of a Boolean query; it cannot be used on its own. If there is no operator between two words, AND is assumed to be the operator. Round brackets can be inserted around parts of the query to control the order in which the operators are evaluated.

Phrase searching:
This search method can be used to search for a complete phrase. When a phrase is entered into a query, the phrase as a whole is used, rather than the individual words which constitute the phrase. Documents which contain the exact phrase will be returned with a higher weight than those that simply contain the same words which make up the phrase. To specify something as a phrase, enclose it in double quotes (for example "this is a phrase"). If you wish to influence the weight of a phrase, you can add a + or - symbol as a prefix: +"this is a phrase"

Sorting options:
You can choose how you would like the results of your query to be displayed. The default setting (Relevance) sorts by percentage score (this is determined by the relevance of each item). Relevance is a rating of how well the contents of each document item match the search terms and conditions you have typed in. Document items which have the same score are then ordered by word proximity - in other words, an item which contains search words close to each other will be ranked more highly than one which contains the same words, but not close to each other. You can also order by date with either the latest first or earliest first.

You can choose to exclude all items which have a relevance below a level you specify. To do this, you can select from a list of relevance ratings in the excluding items less than % relevant drop-down list.