Search Help

To use the Eastern North Carolina (ENC) Classifieds' search tool to get refined search results you'll need to understand a few important functions.

The search tool and browse function are 2 separate entities to help you find what you are searching. The search tool searches a collection from the current data in our database and the browse function browses the actual data currently in the database. The subtle difference is that the collection does not define the data into fields as does the database.

The search collects all of the classified ads from Freedom ENC papers that have not expired. Ads that are currently running in the 3 papers, the Jacksonville Daily News, the New Bern Sun Journal and the Kinston Free Press are included in the search.

The search will not separate ads for the 3 area markets that FENC covers, even though you may have selected your market area for browsing.

Maximize your results by selecting 10, 20, 50 or 100 results; since the idea of searching is to minimize your results to find your best match, the search will not paginate or give results beyond 100.

Use boolean searches, as follows:

AND finds ads containing both words it joins (e.g., ford AND explorer will find all ads containing ford and explorer).

OR finds ads containing either of the words it joins (e.g., ford OR explorer will find ads containing the word ford or the word explorer, but not necessarily both).

NOT finds ads containing the word that precedes it but that do not contain the word(s) that follows it (e.g., ford NOT explorer would find all ads with the word ford, but would exclude any ad with the word explorer even if the word ford was in the ad).

, (comma) finds ads containing at least one of the words specified, ranking them using "the more, the better" approach for each category, so ads with the most occurences of the words searched for are given the highest rank in each category.

Additional operators: Try using ? (question mark) as one wildcard character, the * (asterisk) as one or many wildcard characters, the ' (single quote) as the stemmed variations of a word, quote the word or phrase with double quotes to find exact matches of the word or phrase, use parentheses to group words or phrases together,

Proximity or juxtaposition: <NEAR> will find words that are near each other (e.g., chevrolet<NEAR>malibu will find ads that chevrolet and malibu are near each other, even if the year or other words are in between). <NEAR/N> allows you to search for words within a specified distance from each other (e.g., chevrolet<NEAR/5>malibu would only show results when the word chevrolet and malibu are within 5 words of each other).