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The search functionality on this forum
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Posted by 22111
Dec 29, 2018 at 11:19 AM
@forum-owner
In order to get some ideas of here’s on “Visual Outliner”, I tried the search for “Visual Outliner”, with the double quotes; I got an error message in the line of “not allowed”, in fact “character not allowed”, so a so-called “phrase search” isn’t possible currently. I then entered Visual Outliner and got 229 “results”, most of them allegedly - I hadn’t the patience to check this really out - for whole threads where each item is anywhere in the thread, even on different output pages, i.e. not even a “near search”. (I suppose “AND”, not “OR” here, since “OR” would have brought a 4-digit “result” list instead, I would think.)
Most developers are aware of similar problems and thus name their software in one word, but there is no “VisualOutliner” unfortunately; the same applies to some other software.
I suppose you have bought or do rent the search functionality for this forum. (?) - Perhaps there is some “phrase search” functionality just to be activated? (Don’t know, of course.)
(The other alternative for similar problems would probably consist of downloading the archive - but is it up-to-date? - and then put your respective desktop search upon it.)
Posted by Gorski
Dec 29, 2018 at 11:37 AM
Just use Google:
site:www.outlinersoftware.com “Visual Outliner”
Site search on most websites is lousy.
Posted by 22111
Dec 29, 2018 at 01:43 PM
You’re right, that’s the way I do it very often indeed, whenever that’s necessary (I just missed to mention it here), but doing so systematically would somewhat invalidate any try to implement a basic site-proprietary search functionality.
The synthesis: If the latter is “lousy”, then, why not discard it BUT trigger the respective “site:YourSite.NowAround2,000AvailableSuffixesOfWhichAroundAtLeast990AreCrap google search (even some additional tab) from any user input (plus “enter”) in the search field (which would remain then).
I think if google doesn’t prevent this use (I didn’t try it out yet), that would be the very best-while-being-awfully-easy idea for doing it for most sites out there, currently.
Posted by washere
Dec 29, 2018 at 10:33 PM
Domain name is enough, by removing www. you get all subdomains hits too, like blog.xyz.com forum.xyz.com ftp. news. etc it might have, also can swap around:
“Shangri la” +heaven -hell site:xyz.com
+ means included or must be in hits, - means excluded or must not be:
Outline +tree -plant -garden
Another useful one, filetype, e.g. Find all doc, epub, PDF, txt, cvs etc
E.g. search for thesis, but only as pdf, in MIT:
site:mit.edu filetype:pdf thesis
Or every pdf it’s got:
site:abc.com filetype:pdf
https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Aabc.com+filetype%3Apdf+&oq=site%3Aabc.com+filetype%3Apdf
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
Posted by Lothar Scholz
Dec 30, 2018 at 02:55 AM
Do this search option really still work?
The “-” as an excluding pattern was unfortunately removed long ago.
And i have my real educated doubts about a few others.
Google search has become as lousy as the average site search when
you really want looking for something and not its not a pop culture question.