Searching the American Presidency Project Documents

  • A search term is a valid word at least 3 characters in length.
  • The Search filter criteria for the ALL, ANY or NONE values may not exceed 256 total characters per field.
  • Search phrases are collections of search terms contained in double quotation marks. Example: "live in infamy"
    → Try "live in infamy" example search
  • By default multiple search phrases are combined as term1 or term2 or term3 unless otherwise specified. The search input, taxes "great news", is equivelant to a search for documents with the word taxes or the phrase "great news" existing in the same document
    → Try "great news" or taxes search
  • Search phrases will ignore special symbols and puncutation within a phrase. An example is searching for "in in in". So search via keywords rather than grammatical punctuation in a document for best results.
    → Try "in in in" search
  • The All Terms field performs an AND search across all the entered search terms for that field.
  • The Any Terms field performs an OR search across all the entered search terms for that field.
  • The Exclude Terms field assures the terms Do Not appear within the search results.
  • By diversly making use of combinations of the All, Any and Exclude fields it's possible to build complex queries with mutliple conditions.
  • To limit results within a range of dates provide criteria for the From and To search fields in the format of MM-DD-YYYY. Adding criteria to the From field limits the current search from the entered date through todays date. Adding criteria to the To year searches content from the inception of the APP project through the provided ending date. Providing both date values limits the search between a range of calendar dates.
    → Try searching for documents From 2009 and newer
    → Try searching for documents To 1950
    → Try searching for documents From 2000 To 2002 search
    → Try searching within documents in 2010
  • Note: search terms are case-sensitive. A search for trump is not the same search as a search for Trump.
    → Try "truman" search and → Try "Truman" search

Wildcard Searches

Wildcard Search Type Special Character Example(s)
Single character (matches a single character)   ? The search string te?t would match both test and text.

Multiple characters (matches zero or more sequential characters)

  *

The wildcard search:
tes*
would match test, testing, and tester.
You can also use wildcard characters in the middle of a term. For example: 
te*t 
would match test and text.

- The American Presidency Project