10. Searching the Forums

[dkightley]

The search facility on the forum is quite powerful, but because you're searching in a freeform text forum facility, it can sometimes be challenging to find the best answer to your question.

The important thing to remember is that you're not asking the forum system a question, you're trying to imagine what *other* people might have asked or how they might have reported on something.

If you're getting an error message somewhere, then the first thing to try is to simply paste the error message in and see what you get back, maybe someone else reported having this error in which case it's a good bet that they pasted it in exactly. A variation on this might be to take the key elements of the error and try that - someone might have manually re-typed the error and not quite got it right, however the key bits should still be valid (any numbers, filenames etc).

If you type in more than one word then you should be careful to choose whether you want the 'any' or the 'all' selector picked - it defaults to 'search for ANY terms or use query as entered'. This will look for what you have typed, but will also find everything that matches even one of the words - so you can imagine typing in a sentence such as "install cabview" will by default report on everything that has 'install' and 'cabview', which will be a big list!

If you're looking for a post which is by a particular author then you can type that username in to the Author box. If you don't know the full username you can use a wildcard for partial matching e.g. any of the following would find NeutronIC's posts:

neutr*
NEU*
N*IC

Additionally, you can further restrict your search by selecting a particular forum or category in which to run your search - so if you're getting lots of mismatches in other forums and you know it's in one forum or group of forums (aka category) then you can restrict using these two selectors.

Further, if you know a post was done in the last n days, weeks or months then you can limit the time that the search will go back through (useful if you know you saw something posted this week and now you're trying to find it again for reference).

You're ultimately searching within posts, but you can choose to see the results in terms of the topics they are in (the default) or the individual posts themselves. You can switch it to 'posts' so that you can see precisely what your search is bringing up, however it can be quite useful to see all the topics that come back with one or more posts that match, as often the majority of the topic may well be about the subject you're trying to find.

Learning to search in the forum, as with any search, is a bit of a black art. The key is to try and think of how someone else would have written a post about what you're trying to find, and then supply more or less detail as required to tune the results. Also remember, not everyone spells correctly so sometimes variations in spelling may yield results.

[ashgray]

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