The News Archive will be gradually enabled for existing online media monitoring users. The monitoring licence your organisation holds may also restrict access to this content.

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This update introduces Boolean searching, where users can build complex search strings instead of the standard ‘Keywords Mode’.

New validation will help users identify potential issues within the Boolean they are using - making the system become more intuitive and easier to use.

These updates will continue to lay the groundwork for future improvements incoming to media monitoring and allows us to improve these over time based on feedback and usage.

A new alternative method for searching historic articles within the news archive.

The search area now includes two options where users can easily switch between basic 'Keywords' and 'Boolean'.

Boolean Search uses a combination of keywords and the three main Boolean operators (AND, OR and NOT) to organise and sift through your searches. It produces more accurate and relevant results, allowing you to navigate through relevant articles, while disregarding unrelated results.

The Boolean operators that are currently supported with explanation:

Boolean searches can be done on any search engine across the Internet using certain symbols and there is no restriction on how many you use in one search string.

Five elements of Boolean search:

1. AND: placing AND between search terms will cause results to include both (or all) of the keywords. The search terms that follow the AND must appear in the search results.

2. OR: using OR when you want to search for something that has the possibility of including either set of search terms. All combination possibilities will come up.

3. AND NOT: useful when you want to exclude a specific search term from appearing in any results. This will prevent the terms from coming up.

4. Quotation marks "": when you want to search for an exact phrase, use quotation marks around that phrase.

5. Parentheses (): placing parentheses allows separation of the terms and preference to be given to specified ones.

Boolean search is a very powerful tool that allows use of long, complex search strings to find results, which will inevitably be difficult to troubleshoot when there are errors.

This new search provides automatic validation on your searches and returns feedback if any errors are found. The search will also be halted and no results will be returned.

These syntax errors will be listed to provide insight into what went wrong, and what needs to be resolved before continuing. The Validate button can be used to manually check the formatting for any errors and you must re-validate once these are resolved to Run the search for results.

Examples of errors: