We report on efforts to identify large samples of very and extremely metal-poor stars based on medium-resolution spectroscopy and ugriz photometry obtained during the course of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey ( SDSS ) , and its extension , SDSS-II , which includes the program SEGUE : Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration .
To date , over 8000 stars with [ Fe/H ] \leq - 2.0 and effective temperatures in the range 4500 K < T _ { eff } < 7000 K have been found , with the expected numbers in this temperature range to be well over 10,000 once SEGUE is completed .
The numbers roughly double when one includes warmer blue stragglers and Blue Horizontal-Branch ( BHB ) stars in these counts .
We show the observed low-metallicity tails of the Metallicity Distribution Functions for the cooler SDSS/SEGUE stars obtained thus far .
We also comment on the confirmation of an inner/outer halo dichotomy in the Milky Way , and on how this realization may be used to direct searches for even more metal-poor stars in the near future .