Searching the ICDN Archive

We have added a powerful search mechanism to the ICDN Newsletter, so that you can find past news items by topic, keyword, or date. This ICDN's search engine works very much like the major Internet search engines (Excite, Infoseek, Hotbot, etc.)

To Search by Category

By far the easiest and quickest way to display all news items in a particular category (e.g., "Standards/Architecture") is to click on the category name to the far left side of the newsletter. The search engine will then display, in chronological order (newest first), all of the entries in that category over the past 16 weeks. This "quick search" capability is a convenient way to quickly find ITS deployment-related news items in categories that most interest you. To return to the "normal" ICDN Newsletter, simply press the "back" button on your web browser.

You can also search by category using the search form that is built in to the ICDN Newsletter. This search form is located immediately below all of the news items, and just above links to the old-style (non-searchable) ICDN archives and section covering what's new on public-sector web sites. This search form encompasses two separate search mechanisms, a "search by keyword" mechanism (covered below), and a "search by category and date" mechanism, discussed here. To search by category and date, simply select the category of interest in the left scroll-down menu, and the date of interest ("prev week" up to "prev 8 weeks") from the right scroll-down menu, and press the bottom "search button."

To Search by Keyword

Keyword searching is the most accurate and all-encompassing way to find information in the ICDN archives, because many news items "straddle" several different categories but are classified in only one category (for simplicity sake). Searching by keyword searches against both the headline and article summary, and will identify all relevant news items no matter what category in which they are classified.

To search by keyword, simply type the words of interest in the top space in the search form, separated by commas. Next, select either "ANY" or "ALL." ("ANY" will find news items that contain any of the keywords that you have specified; an "ALL" search will only display items that contain all of your keywords.)

There are some simple rules and tricks for searching-by-keyword:

• Keywords cannot be single letters or the words "or" or "and"
• Search for phrases (e.g., "traveler information") simply by typing that phrase (without quote marks, of course) into the form.
• Multi-word phrases not separated by commas are treated as single keywords, e.g. "New York, trucking" searches for TWO keywords ("New York" and/or "trucking"), not three keywords.
• Searches are case-insensitive, so that searching for "DSRC" is the same as searching for "dsrc".