Searching The Forums

[+sept1c_tank]

A lot of talk lately about markwells and the forum search feature. Personally, I enjoy markwells, so don’t be afraid of offending me by markwelling this topic.

 

I (attempt to) use the search feature a lot. I like to research things. For instance, I did a search for “forum search techniques” (I came up empty) before posting this topic.

 

Often, I search for things unsuccessfully, only to find that another poster has achieved the results I wanted. Obviously there are bad, better and good techniques for searching (specifically these forums).

 

Please describe your search techniques.

 

I hate it when someone markwells me!

[+Markwell]

Biggest tip is to remember that sometimes the topic was discussed more than 30 days ago. When searching for a keyword remember to change that drop down for time frame to more than 30 days. I usually change it to either From the Beginning or In the Last Year.

 

If you're looking for a phrase, put it in quotes. Project APE alone won't retrieve results because APE is only a 3 letter word, but "Project APE" will get a lot of hits (as will "Project A.P.E.")

[Smaug1]

What I do that seems to be effective is to search for parts of a word ONLY in the topic. (there is a little box you check for that)

 

If you search for the whole word, you might be eliminating a certain tense of the word.

 

If you search the contents, you'll come up with all sorts of false hits.

 

Another tip, search for other ways to phrase the same thing. There might be a certain way that someone refers to something that is different than how you phrase it yourself.

 

I think you can use logic in the search fields: for example. 'Geocache + DNF' will yield anything with both words in it. If you had just searched on Geocache DNF, it would only find it if they were in that particular order. (not 100% sure on that one)

 

Lastly, when all of that fails, just go through the entire history page by page and quickly scan the topics for stuff that might contain what you're looking for.

[+Subterranean]

I think you can use logic in the search fields: for example.  'Geocache + DNF' will yield anything with both words in it.  If you had just searched on Geocache DNF, it would only find it if they were in that particular order. (not 100% sure on that one)

Yep, this is true, exept that the boolean operator "AND" is used instead of the "+" sign.

 

One thing that annoys me is that none of the search terms can be shorter than four letters. It's actually impossible to perform a search on "DNF," for example.

[+briansnat]

Lastly, when all of that fails, just go through the entire history page by page and quickly scan the topics for stuff that might contain what you're looking for.

 

That's my method, so when I markewll something, you know I put a lot of time and effort into it and I'm not just blowing off the person who asked the question .

[+Tzoid]

It may also be productive to use Google. Just remember to limit the search to the forums by using the 'site:forums.Groundspeak.com' search term.