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A few hints on searching macosxhints.com for hints Site News
Back in October, I ran a brief announcement stating that the search engine had been improved. However, I still get quite a few people asking (via email) exactly how it's supposed to work, so I thought I'd write up an "Intro to searching for hints" to maybe answer some of the questions before they're asked.

Once I get the Geeklog upgrade completed, the good news is that I've found someone (thanks Danny!) who is willing to help greatly improve the search engine in the newest Geeklog release. But if you'd like to make the most of the current search engine until that (long delayed) site upgrade occurs, read the rest of the article for some hints on how I use the engine (and I spend a lot of time searching here!).

The search engine here isn't great, but with the recent hack I added to it, it's no longer terrible. There are basically only two types of searches you can run:
  1. Phrase searches: Phrase searching is finding a string of one or more words. For example, if you remember that a certain article used the phrase pinning your dock, you can find articles that contain only this exact phrase. To run a search on phrases, just enter the entire phrase, spaces and all, without quotes or any other sorts of delimiters. In this example, just type pinning your dock into the search box and hit Go. Phrase searching is usually of limited value unless you've been here before and happen to remember a phrase from the hint you want to find (see below for one exception to that statement).

  2. Multi-word searching: This was the hack I added a couple of months ago, and it enables you to find all the hints that contain all of the words you enter, in any order, as long as they all appear. You run a multi-word search by entering the words separated by spaces. For example, assume you were trying to find out if it's possible to have OmniWeb's favorites listed in its dock menu. If you search here on Omniweb using the first search method, you'll get 81 matches. However, if you search on Omniweb,dock, you'll narrow the results to 23 matches. Even better, searching for Omniweb,dock,favorite finds just two matches, one of which contains the information you want. So when you really want to find soemthing here, use the multi-word search and pick very common words that you're pretty sure would have to be in the hint.
Beyond the two methods of searching, here are some tips to help you search more efficiently:
  • This isn't Google or AltaVista, so don't use quotes of any sort nor the plus or minus sign; they won't help, and they'll pretty much guarantee you don't find any matches.

  • The search engine is not case sensitive.

  • When you're using the phrase-search mode, you can search for items that contain spaces either before or after their names. Why might this be useful? Because right now, the search engine returns any words that match at least (but not only) what you typed. So if you search on "icab," you'll find there are 21 matches on the site. But that doesn't mean there are 21 hints about iCab here, as words like "applicable" include the "icab" substring. So to find hints about iCab, try running two separate searches in phrase search mode. First search on " icab", browse the results, and then search on "icab " and browse those results. These two 'with spaces' searches will prevent the engine from matching substrings in words.

  • Because of a limitation in the way in which I wrote the multi-word search hack, you cannot search for items with spaces in this mode. So if you enter " icab,html", the search engine will strip the leading and trailing spaces before running the search. Adding quotes around the phrase will not help.

  • Because the search engine matches partial words, use the longest word possible to help narrow your results. So instead of searching on "Pref," search on "Preferences." The longer the words you use to search with, the fewer partial-match finds you will get.

  • You can search for phrases and words in one multi-word search. So a search on web browser,mozilla will find all hints that contain both the phrase 'web browser' and the word 'mozilla.'

  • Use the Advanced Search page to narrow your results even more. If you know you're looking for an application, set the "Topic" pop-up to "Apps" before you search. Similarly, if you know the article was published in the last three months, enter the date restrictions (the format is YYYY-MM-DD, so March 5, 2002 is "2002-03-05").

  • Generally speaking, there's not much need to search on comments (using the "Type" pop-up on the Advanced Search page) unless you know that the thing you're looking for was mentioned in a comment. There are roughly 2,700 hints here, but there are over 15,000 comments, so anything you search on will be matched many, many times on a comments search! If you use this mode, enter a lot of words in multi-word mode to try to narrow the results.

  • To browse all of the articles in any one area in a sort-of "Headline News" fashion, select the topic to be browsed and do not enter any key words on the Advanced Search page. Although the instructions state that you must search on three characters or more, this restriction is lifted when you have a topic selected. When the results window opens, you can use command-clicks to open articles in new windows to browse many hints quickly.
That's about it for the searching tips; as I said, I know it's not great, but with the additon of multi-word searches, it's actually become much more useful to me, and I hope the same holds true for all of you. Hopefully we'll be able to roll a new and greatly improved search engine into the site upgrade project ... stay tuned!
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MacOSXHints and Searchling
Authored by: bluehz on Dec 16, '02 12:45:25PM

After reading last week about the Searchling menu addition I have been hooked. Converting search criteria left and right. Unfortunately - I have been unable to ascertain a method of searching the MacOSXHints forums with Searchling methodology. This is not specific to MacOSXHints, but rather to all forums that use php-based forums.

I don't know if its just not possible, or if I haven't discovered the solution yet, but I would sure like to be able to search the forums with Searchling (or for others they may be using bookmarklets, or similar utilities) also. Would sure like to hear from other MacOSXHints users if they have a solution to this problem.



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MacOSXHints and Searchling
Authored by: bortQ on Dec 17, '02 10:32:47PM

Use this URL to search macosxhints:
http://www.macosxhints.com/search.php?mode=search&datestart=0&dateend=0&topic=0&type=stories&author=0&query=

just add your search term at the end



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Forum searches...
Authored by: robg on Dec 18, '02 12:02:14AM
I think the problem is that vBulletin, the forum software, takes steps to hide the search string from casual eyes. When you hit submit, the search gets processed and is given a search ID, ie:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/search.php?s=&action=showresults&
searchid=67762&sortby=lastpost&sortorder=descending
In this example, I searched for "test," but all you see is "searchid=67762". I think this would make it impossible to search the forum site with an automated tool, as it couldn't send the command to the search pre-processor... Sorry... -rob.

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Next version
Authored by: Xeo on Dec 16, '02 04:37:09PM

I hope the next version of your website uses more standard search techniques. Boolean operators would be nice, but at the least, a space delimited search should search for every word, not the whole string, and a quoted string should search for the whole string. I never knew multi-word searches could be done here, however, so I'm glad you posted this hint.



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Next version
Authored by: pythagorous on Dec 16, '02 07:35:11PM

Boolean fulltext search is not available in MySQL 3.x, which this site is running. It is available in MySQL 4, but from what I've heard that release isn't quite ready for prime-time.



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Just a thought...Google it!
Authored by: jriskin on Dec 20, '02 05:24:43AM

Another easy way is to just use google. You can specifically limit your search to any given site with this command...

site:www.macosxhints.com

You just put that in and your search terms...or here is the url version

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.macosxhints.com+your+search+here



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