You may include any number of search terms separated by spaces. [Order only makes a difference as explained in the last paragraph, below.] However, all the search terms mentioned must be included in an individual "listing" for that listing to be returned. It is therefore safer to search for just "webber" than it would be to search for "andrew lloyd webber", if only because there is much more chance for mistyping. The exception to that rule is if you need to narrow down your search to a reasonable number of found listings: entering "andrew" would return too much to conveniently look at.

If the only search term you include is the name of a Reader listings category (in abbreviated form), all the listings for that category will be returned. (This is the same as clicking on a category like "Performance" as a link.) The abbreviated names are "shortlist", "listings", "performance", "dance", "minireviews", and "readings". While this in itself is of limited usefulness, it can be combined with another search term to return only the dance entries for Ruth Page Theater, or only the readings entries that mention poetry. Note that this term would also be searched for as a word used in the entry of a listing in any category.

NOTE: During the period leading up to New Years' Eve, the abbreviation "NYE" can be entered as a search term to restrict results to those for New Year's Eve.

This is a simple string search. In particular, the system has no knowledge of dates. Theater listings use a compact "through December 9" style of describing when a production is playing, so entering days or dates will only produce chance hits.

And here's an arcane problem, that should not come up very often: if you use multiple search terms, and one is a part of one to its right, nothing will be found. In other words, "tuesday day" will return many, many listings, but "day tuesday" will return none, since the highlighted "day" part of all the "tuesday"s will make them invisible in looking for "tuesday."