Guide to Searching Past Content on VOA Persian Website - 2003-05-31

Guide to Searching Past Content on VOA Persian Website - 2003-05-31. The search engine of the VOA database is one of the most powerful search engines available. While many websites lack an internal search engine or are forced to use public engines like 'Google', the VOA search engine, which uses Cold Fusion technology, has traditionally been excellent and top-notch in data mining. To conduct a successful search, it is useful to pay attention to a few helpful tips: 1- In the upper right corner of the Persian page voanews.com/Persian, there is a box for entering a keyword. As the title above the box indicates (Figure 1), if the desired word is entered in this box, only content from the last two weeks will be searched. 2- Below that box, you will see the word 'Search' (Figure 2). If you click 'Search', you will go to the advanced search page (Figure 2). On this page, you will first notice 'Language', which is preset to Persian. However, from this language box, you can also select other languages, such as English, to access articles from the English VOA site. 3- If you are unsure when the desired content was published, in the 'From' box, set the search date one year back: for example, 05/17/2002. 4- The search engine only searches the titles of the content or the teaser description and does not consider the content and words of the article. Therefore, if your search yields no results, try searching for the content by entering another word. 5- Entering just one word for the search is better than entering multiple words as Boolean parameters. For example, if the goal is to find content about 'Looting of the National Museum of Baghdad', it is better to search the words in quotes individually rather than combining them with a + sign or quotes to form a compound word. 6- If your computer cannot type in Persian, you can enter the desired word by copying and pasting it into the search box. To do this, on any Persian page where you see the desired word or a similar word, place the mouse at the beginning of the first letter, right-click, and drag over the word to highlight it. Then click on Edit from the top menu and then click Copy. Place the cursor in the search box and click. Go back to Edit and this time click Paste.