A results list which hides Duplicates groups very similar articles together, providing you with a better idea of the number of different stories matching your search criteria. Grouping duplicates is the default display option. If you wish to view the complete list of articles (including "duplicates"), select the Show option at the bottom of the list of navigators along the right side of any list of results.
FPinfomart.ca's default is to show results with Duplicates hidden every time, unless you change this default in your Preferences. (Note that Preferences are not available to Pay-Per-View clients). To change your default selection to Show Duplicates, click Display from the Settings menu at the bottom left of your screen. Make the appropriate change to your display settings. Ensure you click the grey save button to implement your changes.
Although there are never exact duplicate articles on FPinfomart.ca, sometimes the differences between two articles can be very minor. Some examples of situations where stories are very similar include:
- A newspaper may publish an early and a late edition of the paper - and the story may change by a single (or just a few) word or words.
- A newspaper may publish two different regional editions of the paper (e.g. the National Post has a "Toronto Edition" and an "All but Toronto" edition)
- A newswire story may be picked up by several different newspapers, and reprinted essentially intact, save for the newspaper's unique headline.
- A broadcaster (TV or radio) may include the same copy in the hourly news segment.
To facilitate "duplicate detection," FPinfomart.ca compares the first 10 words of the text of each article (NOT including the headline or dateline). If there is a match, then the similar or "duplicate" articles are grouped together, and a single representative from that grouping is shown in your results list.
The representative story, or "parent" article, is always the first version of the story loaded into our database.
Always remember that you can see all articles, regardless of similarity, by clicking the Show Duplicates link at the bottom right of the results list. As well, you can see any single grouping of results by clicking the link which says "# similar hits" just underneath the "parent" article.
A note about broadcast (TV and Radio) Content
Broadcast items are always 10 minutes in length. Therefore, since a newscaster may vary the opening or top story for every hourly news segment, it is possible that a segment containing text identical to another segment will not be identified as duplicates. This is because we use only the first 10 words for duplicate detection, and the identical text may appear much later in the transcript.
For Customer Service, please call 1-800-661-7678, or e-mail helpdesk@fpinfomart.ca.
