This FAQ is directly related to the Searches and Difficult Questions Forum, which was created to help DSLR users to successfully search the site for old posts etc. and to help users who have posted difficult questions that have gone unresolved in other forums on the site.

The forum is frequented by many site users who try their best to be helpful to others, and who bring some impressive skills at searching and solving problems.

The forum is moderated by:

mjf

No. This forum was originally created as a repository for questions asked in the other forums that never seemed to have a resolution. As a rule, posts should be made in the respective area to the question at hand. If your question goes unanswered after a period of time or isn't resolved, ask the forum host to move it over here.

The regulars of Difficult Searches and Questions may not come up with the answer but they (like all who have tried before them) will try their best to help.

To quickly view your recent posts, and whether there are any new posts in their threads, you can click on the gray Posts link at the top of the menu bar:

See also Searching for a post older than 90 days

You can search the site from the top right of almost any page, or in any forum from the search box.

This search engine has its limitations: It will not search for phrases, or multiple words adjacent to each other. It also does not explicitly support Boolean searches, such as "Cable AND expensive", "router OR switch", etc.

Putting your search words in quotes does not work.
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What are "stopwords"?

Stopwords are words that are too common. If you search for a common word, like 'help', the system has to retrieve possibly 200,000 posts containing 'help' and the page would probably time out or the server would bog down. If you see "(stopword)" in the results, you'll know that you used a word or character that was ignored by the search engine.

The search functionality that IS provided is equivalent to a Boolean "AND" of each term you enter.

For example entering:
router switch
... causes the search engine to find all documents containing both "router" AND "switch".
Many special characters are also ignored by the search engine, such as:
@ " +

Thanks to truckeean for this entry.

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You can now construct a link to the Topic Search (upper right corner in each forum main page to search for a topic in a forum. Here's how:

/topicsearch/forum-name/topic

where forum-name is the actual forum name, and topic is the topic you'd like to search. For example:

To search for all topics related "NetBEUI" in Networking forum, one would do:
/topicsearch/sharing/netbeui
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Thanks to graffixx for this entry.

You can view older threads by clicking "Show Topics For" a certain number of days at the bottom of the forum page.



Why no longer than 60 days?
Paging through popular forums can be a big source of site timeouts. For the system to show you topics from 100-150 days ago, it must pull and sort in date order all topics in the last 6 months in that forum. That can take an excessive amount of time if the site is also busy, and during that time, nobody can post/edit/reply at all.

The Site Search feature has two options: Last 90 Days, and Older, to 1999.



The more detail you can enter, the better chance of success your search will have. Entering the poster's name, selecting the appropriate forum, and using keywords as unique as possible will all assist in conducting a successful and more rapid search.

Do not use quotes ... they don't work.

Note: If you use ONE search word, the search will only check the first 5000 instances of that word, across ALL posts made site-wide regardless of user, and if the search word is even a little bit common, a warning is displayed that you need more terms. If you use TWO or more search words, and put the more uncommon word first, (this speeds the search, although not necessary), then you will see much better results.

A: If you know the approximate date of a post, you can put it in the search box using this form 2000-09-02. Be sure to check the 'All Text' button also.

News search sites are designed to browse multiple news sources based on your area of interest. Below is a constantly evolving list of such pages.

Google News Search
Daypop
NewsNow

Many people use a popular web portal to begin their internet browsing everyday but don't know of the tools available for searching the web. The list below points to these sites.

AOL
Comcast
MSN
Yahoo

Need facts and figures? Go to one of these online encyclopedias for your answer.

Encyclopedia Britannica
Encyclopedia Smithsonian
Library of Congress
MSN Encarta
RefDesk
Wikipedia

A: Here is one way to find a "first post".

Start your search in any forum. The important thing to note is using the search button located under the logout button didn't yield the proper screen.

In the subsequent screen, enter the "Joined" date in the search box because it shows up in all posts: 2001-03-26 then hit enter.

This takes you to the next screen, which may tell you there is no specific match.

You can customize this screen to add additional search criterion. Plug in a name for "username", change the forum to search in from "Canadian" to "All" for instance, and change "Topics only" to "All text" then clicke "Older to...1999".

If you're lucky, only one post will show up.

You can do the search again using the same method, only this time, when you receive that post as a result, click on the post and then select the thread the post was attached to (listed in the top right corner of the page) and find out even more about the post.
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Thanks to Michael for this procedure.

If you use ONE search word, the search will only check the first 5000 instances, across ALL posts made site wide regardless of user, and a warning is displayed that you need more terms if the search word is even a little bit common. But if you use TWO or more search words, and put the more uncommon word first, for speed (although that isn't necessary), then everything works out ok.

As an experiment, I went off to find an old post I made in all-things-unix. Using two search words (rpm and chroot), and searching by user, I could find it easily.

Of course, the more information you have, (i. e. user name) the easier the search.

NOTE: If a thread has been LOCKED it will not come up in a search.
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Credit for this information goes to justin

Sometimes the problem is not with search, so much as that some
glitch has occurred.

For example, let's say there is a glitch (probably memory full) that has removed the L-Z index of 2002. So you can find it by searching for ftpd, but not for ftpd+telnetd or ftpd+linux etc.

If you think you have found a glitch, report it in the Site Bugs or Site Help forums and someone will check it out for you.