Up above, there, advanced search, has been glitched for months, pulling up only topics that had your search term in their titles.

Konnie and Steve brought this up a few months ago.

I think it's fixed (yay Bobbie)..... please post if you don't find it to be working right.

THANKS!

Bumping because I know several members are struggling with power outages; trying not to lose posts.


Please let me know how your searches are going if you do any.

Well, okay, since you asked......I'm just going to finally come out and say this, even though it's kind of embarrassing. I have never been able to get the Advanced Search feature to work. I have tried many times, and I always get a long list of results that have nothing to do with what I was searching for.

I use search engines every day in my work and consider myself skilled, though certainly no expert. I have used the search function on other forums with no problem. But the search feature on this board just has me stumped.

I should mention that if I do a search by member name, then I will indeed get that member's posts. That's the only way I can get it to work. So if I am searching for a particular topic that was recently discussed, if I can somehow remember the name of someone who posted in the thread, I have found things that way.

 Quote: Cheri Grissom

Well, okay, since you asked......I'm just going to finally come out and say this, even though it's kind of embarrassing. I have never been able to get the Advanced Search feature to work. I have tried many times, and I always get a long list of results that have nothing to do with what I was searching for.

I use search engines every day in my work and consider myself skilled, though certainly no expert. I have used the search function on other forums with no problem. But the search feature on this board just has me stumped.

I should mention that if I do a search by member name, then I will indeed get that member's posts. That's the only way I can get it to work. So if I am searching for a particular topic that was recently discussed, if I can somehow remember the name of someone who posted in the thread, I have found things that way.

I believe that the most common problems are

1. Not expanding the date range (which is pre-set at one month)
2. Using several words instead of one
3. Using a word that's far too common to be useful in a search (like "dog")


(BTW, I absolutely agree that using the word and the poster's name will often get you MUCH better, faster results.)

Here's an example. I recently wanted some threads about alert-barking and teaching the dog about "quiet" when the owner has checked and OKed whatever the disturbance was.

Knowing that I myself have frequently mentioned my own "It's OK" phrase for my dogs, which is "lawn guys!", I typed in LAWN as my term under advanced search, added my name, and expanded the date range to three years (instead of the one month pre-set).

Even though half or so of the returns were obviously NOT about "lawn guys" (because I used the word "lawn" for other things, like potty training), many threads about barking and teaching "quiet" came up.

You want your search term to be unusual enough NOT to return a million posts. That's why I chose LAWN and not, say, BARK or QUIET. If I didn't know about my term (lawn guys), I would probably have used ALERT and three years. (I just tried it and received several threads about teaching alert barking and "quiet.")

Give me an example and I'll see if I can help with it.

I usually give it a date range of several years, for example, "newer than 5 years, older than 1 day."

I understand a common word would be problematic, but are you saying you can only use one word in the search? For example, what if I wanted to search for "urinary tract infection"? I just tried that one again and the top results I got are several current threads that definitely don't have any of those three words in them. I confess I did not have the time to look at all of the results given, just the first few hits, so maybe some of the subsequent threads had one of those three words. But how on earth does it give me top results with none of the words?

I also was recently searching for any threads about the book "Control Unleashed." Using that as a search term again got me many results that I suppose may have had the word "control" but not "unleashed." I had better luck by searching for the author's name on that one.

Yes, one word.

When you use all three you will get "tract," for example, and even words containing "tract." (That is, more than one word just doesn't work. lol)

URINARY and five years returned many UTI threads. The titles of the threads allow you to skim for what you want to look at first. (To other readers: This is why a title like "Need Advice" or "Help with Puppy" is such a poor idea. )

I agree that the author's name would be much faster than such common words as "control" and "unleashed" unless you had a good date range. If you knew the approximate date range and tightened it up, then UNLEASHED would work quickly. That is, knowing that the book was discussed in early 2011, I typed in "newer than 2 years" and "older than 18 months" and UNLEASHED. This brought it up on page one of the returns (near the bottom). If I had had a better date range than 6 months wide, I'd have gotten it closer to the top of the returns.

BTW, you don't need to fill in both "newer than" and "older than" unless you have a tight range in mind. That is, if you want everything in the last three years, you can just say "newer than 3 years" and forget the "older than."

I'm glad you brought this up! The potential number of returns is so huge (hundreds of thousands of posts) that your specific points about narrowing it down will be very helpful to others, I believe.

Anyone else who has a troublesome example, please post and I'll be happy to do my best.

Thank you, Connie, for taking the time to explain that! It's pretty clear that's what I was doing wrong. I'm sure most of the searches I have tried have contained more than one word.

I'm glad it came up.

I think the sheer number of possible returns made anything beyond one-word terms undoable.

I know it always sounds in explanations like a PITA search function, but once you use it for a while, it becomes invaluable.

Well, until a few months ago ..... LOL

But now that's fixed.

And I am still ready and willing to walk through a search for anyone who has a problem with it.

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