filter by words in description or hint

[+LizzyRN]

Using Project-GC, is it possible to filter out caches that contain a certain word or group of words to meet the requirements of a challenge?

Thanks!

[+arisoft]

Do you have some specific challenge in your mind? Quite large number of challenges does already have checker even though the description does not mention it.

[+LizzyRN]

GC5BCY1 is the specific cache I'm asking about. Thanks, Liz

[+noncentric]

For the Title aspect, you can use geocaching.com's Search page. The "Filters" section has an option to search for specific words/phrases in the cache titles. Just enter the term in the "Geocache Name Contains ..." text box. You'd want to enter one word, then run the search. Then do another search with another word.  If you want to limit by location, then you can put a center point on the Search page and adjust the radius around that point via the "Filters" section - or you can just select a state from the "Filters" section if you want to have a larger target area.

For the Hint or Description, then the Search page won't help. One thing you might try is downloading a bunch of caches in an area, then opening the .gpx file in a text editor, then searching for the specific challenge words in that text file. Of course, you'll only want the caches where the challenge words appear in these sections of the .gpx file:

• <Groundspeak:short_description
• <Groundspeak:long_description
• <Groundspeak:encoded_hints

 

I'm pretty sure that a Project-GC checker does not exist for the type of challenge you mentioned. I found a similar one in OR and just looked to see there is no checker for that one either. If there was, then it would help you identify caches that you've already found that meet the requirements - but checkers won't help you identify target caches to go and search for.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

5 hours ago, noncentric said:

For the Hint or Description, then the Search page won't help. One thing you might try is downloading a bunch of caches in an area, then opening the .gpx file in a text editor, then searching for the specific challenge words in that text file. Of course, you'll only want the caches where the challenge words appear in these sections of the .gpx file:

• <Groundspeak:short_description
• <Groundspeak:long_description
• <Groundspeak:encoded_hints

I've create search engines for sites which do something like this.  One can pull different fields out of a database to create a multi field search index.  In this case, creating an index of the title field, and a "text" field which was a concatenation of the short_description, long_description, and encoded_hints would provide a more robust search.  Other fields could be indexed as well, and specifying the name of the field when entering a query provides more flexibility.  For example:   title:cemetary type:mystery would return mystery/unknown caches with cemetary in the title.  

However, indexing the short/long description would make the search index *much* bigger but there are a few search subsystems that can handle  very large amounts of data.   I worked on our university library catalog which has dozens of fields that are indexed and over 9 million items.  Conducting a search is still very fast (creating the search index from scratch, however, takes a long time).

Edited April 3, 2018 by NYPaddleCacher

[+LizzyRN]

Thank you both!