A few hints on searching macosxhints.com for hints

Dec 16, '02 08:48:14AM

Contributed by: robg

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: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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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20021216054814207