STALIN is NK News' own custom-built search engine, used to parse through a mind-numbing amount of KCNA propaganda. Below are explanations of the various search fields.
Keywords
STALIN is case-insensitive. It searchs for a match in either the title or the body of the articles. Legal characters include all alphnumeric characters, dashes, commas, periods, and single and double quotations. (The advanced mode of STALIN also allows for some wildcard characters, dicussed below.) All keywords must be a minimum of three characters long. If the search string is a phrase, keywords within the phrase can be less than three characters long (e.g. "Kim Jong Il"). Use the buttons "ANY", "ALL" and "EXACT PHRASE" to choose the Boolean logic for your search. There is no need to add connecting words or characters such as "AND" or "OR" within the Keyword field itself; they will be treated as literal keywords. Also, for the exact phrase search, do not enclosed the phrase in quotations (unless you want the quotation marks to be a literal part of the phrase, such as the KCNA's oft-repeated phrase "human rights").
Date Range & Language
You can probably figure these out for yourself.
Format Search Results - Article List or Bargraph
You can either have the resulting articles displayed to you as a list...or you can bargraph the occurance of all articles matching your search by month using STALIN's graphical barchart tool. Each bar in the graph shows all articles that match your search for that month (as opposed to the total occurances of keywords or phrases). All bar lengths are relative to the length of the month with the maximum value, which is 100%, so the bargraph displays the montly results relative to each other. You can switch easily between the two forms of output without having to perform a new search.
Search Mode - Simple & Advanced
STALIN works in two modes, simple and advanced.
Simple mode is a fast character-string search. It simply searchs for any string of characters matching your keywords or phrases. Querys typically take less than a second.
| sophist |
sophist |
Find |
|
sophists |
Find | |
|
sophistry |
Find | |
|
unsophisticated |
Find | |
|
sophism |
Miss | |
| human rights | human rights | Find |
| "human rights" | Find | |
| "human rights" | human rights | Miss |
| "human rights" | Find |
Advanced mode is more powerful and flexible. It's also much more slow (typically 10 seconds per keyword or phrase). Advanced mode allows the use of some wildcard characters, which are especially useful in accounting for Korean-English (and Spanish) transliteration problems. You can also force whole word boundaries in advanced mode. Wildcards are as follows:
| ? | - | any one character |
| * | - | any one character, or no character at all |
| % | - | 'hook' that forces beginning or end of keyword or phrase to become boundary of whole word |
| Kim Yo?ng Sam |
Kim Young Sam |
Find |
|
Kim Yo2ng Sam |
Find | |
| Kim Yong Sam | Miss | |
| Kim Yo*ng Sam |
Kim Young Sam |
Find |
|
Kim Yo2ng Sam |
Find | |
|
Kim Yong Sam |
Find | |
| art | art | Find |
| part | Find | |
| party | Find | |
| art% | art | Find |
| part | Find | |
| party | Miss | |
| %art% | art | Find |
| part | Miss | |
| party | Miss | |
| %human rights% | human rights | Find |
| "human rights" | Miss | |
| %sophis?% |
sophist |
Find |
|
sophism |
Find | |
| sophists | Miss | |
| sophistry | Miss | |
| unsophisticated | Miss |