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Searching the archives



Subject:  Huge frustration with searching the 
archives – SOLVED.

Hello folks, 

I wanted to share some info that took me about more 
years to figure out than I want to admit.  Probably, 
you are smarter than I am and have figured it out 
sooner.  This message is for all of the other 
frustrated boobs like me.

I have always had difficulty searching these archives.

Having been recently directed to these archives, in 
frustration, I decided to try a different search 
approach.

The search engine on the APD archive page 
(http://www.actwin.com/fish/aquatic-
plants/search.html) returns only a few results for a 
given search word.  For instance, the APD search 
feature returns 20 hits on the search phrase “t-8 
ballast” (without quotes).  I suspected that there 
were that many just this year and that there were 
many, many more occurrences of “t-8 ballast” than 
just 20. 

I went to yahoo and searched “t-8 ballast” (still 
without quotes) and found an occurrence on 
www.actwin.com.  Now I used the “More results from 
www.actwin.com” link.  This resulted in 240 hits in 
actwin.com.  Finally!  220 occurrences of “t-8 
ballast” were hidden by using the basic APD search 
feature.  The search engine on the APD search page 
works fine for some things but it certainly it is not 
the best search engine for all cases, especially hot 
topics.  And the help doesn’t cover nuances of 
searches other than operators.  Here is another tip - 
If you hit the “grouped by SUBJECT” button at the top 
of the returned search results from the APD page, the 
site returns 102 hits. 

No wonder the newbies always ask all kinds of 
questions that are covered in the archive. Hopefully 
this message will show up in a search of “searching 
the archives” query.

If you are as stupid as I am and this is news to you, 
there’s still a good chance that you can earn a 
Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering.  So 
don’t give up hope just yet...

Chris

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