Am I just stupid…is there any way to search the forum for a particular interest ie GP-50?
Right margin - renamed to “search our community”
Smile,
Stein
Right hand side, they have TWO search windows. The top one, the one that is visible without scrolling the display, only searches Model Railroader articles, and only works if you are an MR subscriber. The lower down search window, (you have to scroll down to see it) searches this forum allegedly. It isn’t very good. A search object of “gleam track” returned a page of results, only one of which was about gleaming track.
Use Google as follows:
“GP-50” site:http://cs.trains.com/trccs/forums/t/
If you want to search for something else, just use whatever Google search terms you want, then append site:http://cs.trains.com/trccs/forums/t/ to the search. Only the MRR forums will be searched.
One thing that bugs me is that the posts are allegedly sorted by relevance! How does the program decide how relevant the search term is to me, to you and to some casual visitor who just wants to find out if anyone models the Isle of Sodor. It should be by age, either oldest or newest first.
Of course, the sort function is as literal as any other computer. If you enter, “Gleam,” when the usual spelling is, “Gleem,” and the subject is, “Cleaning rail,” the hundred posts you want will be passed over, while something relevant will be pulled out of some dark cranny to fill in the page.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - on gleemed rail)
Try typing “gleam track” INCLUDING the quotes. I got 3 pages, the first page of which were definitely all about gleaming track, I didn’t bother checking page 2 or 3. I did select Entire COmmunity fromt he dropdown, the default is your own posts, and since I know I never wrote about that I didn’t expect ti find any.
I think I see why people post and say they DID search Google but didn’t find anything. ANd the first reply is alink to the desired information. Found on Gogle.
–Randy
10-T errors do occur with some frequency in connection with searches, yes.
Grin,
Stein
Not always. Google has been doing a stealth implementation of personalized results. Two people can now enter exactly the same search terms and get different results.
It’s one of the reasons I have no Google accounts of any kind, and have my browsers set to clear any and all cookies left by the Google monster at the end of a session.
When you enclose the search object in quotes you are telling the program to look for the exact string, namely gleam-onespace-track. When you enter the two words without the quotes the program is supposed to return posts that contain BOTH words. So you get a hit on “gleam the track” as well as “gleam track”. Apparently the software wienies used OR when they should have used AND and return hits on posts that contain either gleam or track. That’s a bug.
In searching with Google, I have found many results linking to these forums.
Some clueless users type their email address into the body of the message. Any person can see the email address without being a member.
DON’T DO THAT.
Any registered user can use the PM option in these forums. Much safer.
Rich
Err - no. It is not an inadvertent programming error. It is a deliberate design decision. May or may not be a smart design decision.
Feel free to explicitly type AND or OR between your search terms if you want more control over how to search.
Smile,
Stein
That’s fairly standard for search engines. Typing 2 or more keywords with nothign but spaces between them means look for ANY of those keywords, using AND menas the result must contain both keywords but not necessarily in close proximity, and using quotes means find the exact phrase.
–Randy
Except for Google, which is the standard. It sees the space between two words as an explicit AND. If you want to look for either word, the OR statement must be used between them.
Considering that most searchers are looking for narrow results, as opposed to broad, defaulting to AND makes the most sense and saves typing AND all the time.