How Do You Find an Old Story on Patch?

This week at Patch we’re going to help you find that article you heard about but never had a chance to read.

First thing to know? Everything on our site moves down in reverse chronological order for the most part, with the newest story appearing at the top of the page.

If the story came from another section other than the news section meaning if it was a blog post, an announcement or event those items bounce onto the Local Voices, Announcements and Events sections once they no longer appear on the front page.

You could, if you were so inclined, scroll back through the pages, to look for something, though if it's more than a couple days old, that can get awfully tedious.

The best way to find a story is to search for it like you would search for anything on a search engine like Google or Bing. In the top right of our blue menu bar just to the right of "More Stuff" there is a lighter blue box with a magnifying glass. You can use that box to search, just like you would on a search engine. The more specific you make the search, the fewer results will come back.

Like search engines, putting two or more words in quotes will bring back results only with those words in that order. To use the example that came with the question last week, our reader was looking for our poll on whether marijuana should be legalized in New Hampshire. If she searched the word marijuana, any story with that word in it would come back. If she looked up should marijuana be legalized?, the search would be more specific and "legalize marijuana" would be even better.

If your search brings back a lot of hits, there are two options in the top right corner of your search results: "date" and "relevance" clicking "date" gives you a reverse chronological order of the stories, relevance is what the search finds most relevant to what you asked for.

Is your search bringing back nothing? Double check your spelling. Our search doesn't bring back suggestions for misspelled words like most search engines do. Still not finding results? It's possible we don't have a story about it.

Archived articles are only stored locally. So, an old story on Seal Beach, Los Alamitos and Rossmoor Patch can only be found on Seal Beach Los Alamitos and Rossmoor Patch, while an old story on Mission Viejo Patch can only be found on Mission Viejo Patch.

Contact guest editor John Crandall at cranny777@gmail.com if you have a question or are looking for something you think we had on the site but cannot find.

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