Overwhelmed by the number of hits found
when you want to search for something here? So much stuff that doesn't apply, you feel like it'd be easier to just start a new post
even if the subject's already beaten to death
a hundred times over? If so, read on . . .
I'll start by showing you in 3 Parts the ABC's of searching Tundra Solutions:
A) With a little digging, you'll discover there's more, but I'll show you at least 5 readily available places from which you can currently launch a search.
B) I'll cover some of the search operators and their syntax for the Google search engine TS uses.
C) Finish with a quick mention of other search options, both here at TS and elsewhere on the web.
Part A (aka A Picture is Worth. . .)
For fairly obvious reasons, choose a place to begin: Sitewide, All Forums, All Blogs, or the Current Forum (as shown below)
If you just want to search within your current thread, go here:
There's more, but these will probably suffice for 99 percent of the searches done here.
Part B (the real key to this User Guide)
OK, so your past searches began from one of the above locations and you weren't happy with the results. It's probably because you just entered some words you hoped were there, got too many results, then retried (using more words) hoping to narrow the findings, but instead got even more hits (not less). Aggravating, huh?
Based on Google's printable
Search Cheat Sheet and
Help Center pages, with the proper syntax you can utilize various search operators to narrow the results returned, as shown below:
+ (=required)
- (=exclude)
| (=OR, as in this|that)
"" (for matching phrases, not single terms)
* (wildcard for words with multiple endings, and more)
Example #1:
+keyword1 +keyword2 +keyword3|keyword4 -keyword5 -"this exact phrase"
would return only threads with
all three keywords 1, 2, and 3 (or 1, 2, and 4) anywhere--in any order--within the thread, but no threads containing keyword5 nor the phrase within the quotes.
Example #2:
+keywor*
returns any thread containing words that begin with the characters before the asterisk (helpful when you're looking for words possibly ending in -ing, -ed, -tion, but the main part of the word is key to your search topic). One potential downside is the resulting increase in the number of hits returned by the search.
BONUS: These same operators work with Yahoo! and many other sites.
At least for now, I'll leave it to others to test (and let us know) whether other wildcard variations work here, like:
*eyword
for keywords with multiple prefixes, or
keyword1 * keyword2
for keywords separated by one or more other words.
Part C (other options)
You'll still benefit from using the operators described in Part B when entering keywords, but TundraSolutions has Advanced Search pages for
Forums,
Blogs, and Threads (not linked since link includes thread number). With obvious purposes, several options are presented to further narrow your results. Take a look at 'em sometime.
When you "mouse over" or left click a UserID at the top left of any post, one of several options presented is Find all posts by (UserID).
Elsewhere, obvious places like Yahoo! and Google offer their own advanced search pages, which--among other things--allow you to restrict the search to a single site or type of TLD (top level domain). Also remember to utilize the "cached" link that accompanies each hit. Cached pages are handy for unresponsive (down or busy) sites, or whose content or links change often.
Lastly, for the ultimate in cached pages, don't forget about the Archive.org
Wayback Machine. (No, it wasn't a subscriber when TS was crawled, so had no access to info in our much missed
Knowledge Base.)
Here's hoping y'all find this useful--maybe even handy enough for the mods to make it a "sticky". And if the mood strikes you, feel free to go click on those scales of justice 'n' toss a few points in the bucket. Happy searching!
How-To: Search This Forum
How-To: Search This Forum
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