The timesofmalta.com search spans one month of articles for regular visitors to the site. Subscribed users can search throughout three months of articles. Subscription is free and includes access to a daily newsletter (in the morning) of the top headlines.

The search engine is a powerful tool that will prioritise your search by relevance. This denotes how well a retrieved set of articles (or single article) meets the information need of the user. Searches can be restricted to date ranges (simply by choosing the dates from the drop-downs in the search form) and sorted in date order (by selecting the appropriate checkbox), rather than by relevance. Searches can also be restricted to a particular section of articles by selecting the required section name checkboxes in the search form.

In order to get more relevant results to your search term(s) please:

Avoid the use of "weak" words.

These are words that, because of a high frequency, won't define a subject or a context properly and return a huge number of results that might skew the relevance of your search. An example of a weak word would be "Malta" since it appears in many articles.

Use of the [space].

A space between two terms will denote an OR symbol. Therefore searching for joe borg will find all articles with the word joe OR the word borg.

Use operators like + [plus symbol], - [minus symbol] and " [double quotes symbol] to help refine your search.

These operators allow you to add words to, or eliminate words from, the returned results. The "+" operator requires that the keyword after the "+" symbol exist somewhere in an article. The "-" operator excludes articles that contain the keyword specified after the "-" symbol. There should be no space after the symbol. For example:

+Joe +Borg will find all articles containing the words Joe AND Borg;

+Joe -Borg will find all articles with the word Joe but WITHOUT the word Borg;

+Joe Borg will find all articles with the word Joe and THAT MIGHT HAVE the word Borg;

"Joe Borg" will find all articles with the EXACT PHRASE Joe Borg.

All search keywords are case insensitive, so there is no need to capitalise proper nouns.

By default, your keyword is searched in all parts of the article, i.e. the headline and body of the article. You can also search within specific parts of an article.

1. Just the headline of the article

If you want to search for a keyword that surely appeared in the title of the headline, simply use the "headline:" switch.
Your search for "standard" in a headline will look like headline:standard (no space is required on either side of the colon). The above operators may also be used.

2. Just the author of the article

If you want to search for an article author, simply use the "author:" switch.
Your search for "joe borg" as an author will look like author:"joe borg" (There should be no space after the symbol). The above operators may also be used as has been demonstrated in the example.

3. More complex searches

If you want to search for the term "standard" that appeared in articles written by a "joe" who is not "joe borg" you would have to be a bit more creative.
Your search will look like author:joe -author:borg +standard.