You can use an underscore to represent a space, so "John_Smith" will only match those two words in a row.
You can join words with an asterisk to say that they may only be 20 characters apart. For example, "John*Smith" will match John Smith, Jonathan Smith, and Johnathan Midlename Smith (or for that matter John "Big Boy" Smith).
You can preceed a word with an exclamation mark to negate it (that is, to exclude articles that use the word). For example, "!Smith" would leave out any article that mentions a Smith. In practice this is really not very useful. But if you add an asterisk it can sometimes be handy. For example, if you search for "John*Smith !Jane*Smith" you should get every article about John that does not also mention his sister Jane.
The first search may take some time if the server has to load up the database, but subsequent searches should be much faster.
NB: Our archives are missing several issues and only go back to March of 2008.
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