Help on syntax for searching "all words"
 

Hi all !

I just registered on this excellent website, on which Google has so often directed me in the past.
I got a stupid issue : I have trouble searching for "all words" in the forums. I found a post saying that it's a mySQL-like syntax : keyword "AND". But, for instance, if I entered "virtualbox AND guest AND resolution" (without the double quotes), searching in the Slackware forum only, it returns for instance the thread cant-get-my-videocard..., which contains no word "virtualbox" !

I didn't find any help page for the search syntax. Does it exists ? If not, I would be great to have one.

Thanks in advance for the response,
stabul

P.S.: the thread I refered to also talks about the "Full-Text Stopwords". Does that mean that all corresponding strings listed at the mySQL website will be excluded from any search ?

It works for me at:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/search.php
I input the search terms you did in the keyword search box. I also insured "Search All Open Forums" was highlighted then I clicked on "Search Now".

That returned the following page with 16 hits:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...archid=3306030

AND is indeed the default, but I'm not able to reproduce what you're seeing. If I search for "virtualbox AND guest AND resolution" without the quotes in only the Slackware forum, the thread you linked to is not returned in the results.

--jeremy

dThanks for your answers. Here are some fresh information : I just realized that the problem occurs while I'm not logged in, i.e. while I'm a simple guest !
P.S.: jeremy, concerning the selected forums, it's in fact Slackware and its child forum Slackware Installation.
stabul

Guests did have boolean searching disabled. If I recall this was done due to resource limits a while back. We should have the needed resources now, so I've enabled boolean across the board for all searches. Thanks for the feedback.

--jeremy

It--your link--doesn't work for me (I think it has expired). In my experience there is no easy way to save an LQ search to give to others.

Jeremy, am I missing something?

Individual searchid's do indeed expire. To post a link that will always work, you'd need to post the actual POST URL of the search in question.

--jeremy

That's what I figured, but how do I capture the permanent URL of a successful or interesting LQ search?

If you want all the defaults, the following will work:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/search.php?do=process&query=$query

(where $query is the urlencoded query you'd like to search for)

--jeremy

That works, as far as it goes; but is there any way to save or construct more complicated searches? I'm thinking w/ tags &/or user names.

You can look at the advanced search page for the variable names to user for more complicated searches. If there's enough demand, it's possible we could add a "save this search" type of link to the search results page.

--jeremy

Was the "save this search" link ever implemented? I do not see it. Certainly the fact that this hasn't been an issue for me for over a year shows that there isn't much demand.

OTOH, even w/ all your hints I cannot figure out how to encode these:

prefixchoice[]=solvedthread_solved
replyless=1
replylimit=0

I referred to the source of the Advanced Search page to find the variables & their values, but I don't know if that was the right thing to do or how to construct the complete URI.

Perhaps if you would do this one, it would point the way to the method for making others.

TIA

The "save this search" feature was never implemented. The next major code upgrade will bring an entirely new search infrastructure with it, so it's possible we'll revisit it at that time. As for more advanced searches, you can take the base URL I posted in #9 and add items from the advanced search to it from there. As an example:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/search.php?do=process&query=$query&replyless=1

Will give you zero reply posts containing "$query".

--jeremy