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the search function
aggri1 - July 15th, 2005 at 09:24 PM

Hi there, I have a question about searching...

Well, I realise that when a question has been asked many times before and someone asks it again it can get old. "Do a search", etc... Like the oil thing, or the PULP/ULP thing, wide 5 split discs, etc...

Well, 'Do a search' is all well and good, but one needs a decent search engine. And I don't know how this one on here works.

I want to find info about towing stuff with a Bay. I tried 'towing AND bay', and got nothing. Now I know for a fact that there is at least one thread with all three of those words in it, so I can only surmise that there is no boolean function in this 'search' tool. 'Towing with a bay' only gives me the one thread I wrote those exact words in. Most other combinations I thought of yielded no results at all.

OK then folks, how do I avoid being irritating by re-posting drivel, and refine my searches: for example, just 'towing' is crap, I'm not spending hours wading through hundreds of irrelevant posts.

Thanks, Aurel.


StenGuns - July 15th, 2005 at 09:26 PM

Faarken good point


ruckus - July 15th, 2005 at 09:37 PM

Make sure you are searching 'from the beginning' and not 'one week'. Got me a couple of times.


aggri1 - July 17th, 2005 at 06:55 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by ruckus
Make sure you are searching 'from the beginning' and not 'one week'. Got me a couple of times.


Heh, yeah, I noticed that. Why does it default to just the last week? Or is that just me?


vanderaj - July 17th, 2005 at 08:07 PM

it defaults to a week as our posts index is over 50 MB in size, which means every post can potentially make the search look through 50 mb of stuff. That's slow. So if you do need to look for a post from the beginning, you can, but by default, it's only the last week which counts.

The search facility is very dumb - using A AND B does not find A & B. Just type A B.

Andrew


aggri1 - August 1st, 2005 at 08:24 AM

Hmm, I see... Thanks!