Have any of you tested the EAN database by searching for a known item?

I have been, and have far too frequently been failing to find the item 
under the significant words, although it is findable under 
insignificant ones.

For instance: New-York Evening Post ran the following ad on September 
13, 1811 (p. 3, col. 3)
AT DYDE'S MILITARY GROUNDS.  Up the Broadway, to-morrow afternoon, 
Sept. 14.
The game of English Trap Ball, will be played, full as amusing as 
Crickets (sic) and the exercise not so violent.
The Spring Gun will be in order to shoot.
Three men will start to run three hundred yards in sacks, at 5 o’clock.
No gambling will be allowed on the premises.

I am interested in the prehistory of baseball, and so searched EAN 
for "trap ball", but found nothing, not even this ad, which I had 
previously turned up while reading the NYEPost.  Nor did the ad turn 
up under English trap, Dyde's, or military.  Under dyde, spring gun 
and crickets I found a similar, though not identical ad from Dyde in 
the Columbian of September 13, 1811 (p. 3, col. 4), but I still 
did not find the NYEPost's ad.  The ad in the Columbian did not appear 
under trap ball either.  I wonder how many other appearances of the 
words "trap ball" in the newspapers digitized for this project have 
been missed; of at least two potential matches, the EAN database found 
neither.  Note that the Evening Post has been digitized for that date, 
and this ad is there, as I could confirm by searching  for "Evening 
Post", date of Sept 13, 1811 -- which shows 180+ entries -- finding 
one on p. 3, choosing the View This Page option, and then looking 
where I knew it to be.   The reproduction seem perfectly legible. 

I have 5 or 6 similar instances of interesting items from newspapers 
of the 1760s and 1790s that I have been able to find in EAN, but only 
by searching for an insignificant word, not by the word or name that 
marks it as interesting.

The EAN databse is nice for what it does, but how many $1000 a year 
should libraries pay for a database that is as unreliable as EAN is?

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern 
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.