[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
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
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail.
http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/