Restricting a search

I may have asked this before, but much has changed with DG, so maybe there's a new answer. How can I search for "prun tomato" (should get prune and pruning and tomato and tomatoes) without getting all hits on prun and all hits on tomato in Search Forums? These 3 searches all yield 330 hits. Too many to look through.

+prun +tomato
"prun tomato"
prun tomato

TIA
LAS

P.S. I used to be able to limit the search to a single forum. I don't see how to do that anymore. Is there a way?

This message was edited Jul 12, 2013 2:43 PM

This thread has the search "rules" in it http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/896664/ - I doubt they have changed. Fell free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Hope this helps, KK.

Thanks, Kaelkitty. That thread suggests that using plus signs should accomplish what I want, but it doesn't (or no longer does), as I describe here. I posted a reply there also.

Thanks atain,
LAS

Hi LAS,

I just realized that I couldn't even find a search feature. So I went to forums and there is a search feature. I typed in (prune tomato) and then went to advanced to limit it to the Tomato forum. I don't know if this will help you.
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1292995/?hl=prune

Loretta

How do you go to advanced after typing in the search box, I can't find advanced.

On the forum page - there is a search feature - type your search and click on the search button. Underneath that will be advanced search. I clicked on search by forum. A drop down menu is on the right side of the page. I don't have the usual thingy to scroll down the list of forums. I clicked on one forum and scrolled down until I found the tomato forum. and then i clicked on search.

I hope this works for you.

Thanks elsie, I see how it is suppose to work now, must still be having troubles with the new look, the forum drop down only has a few forums listed. I am sure there must be a reason the advanced search is not shown on the first page and you instead have to go to a second page. I have overlooked it every time in the past!

The drop down menu is there - it's missing the thingy at the far right side to make it go up and down. Click on a forum and use the page down or arrow to get to more forums.

Ok, now I get it. Thanks!

Yes, limiting it to a forum is helpful. But more helpful... nay essential, is to be able to specif "prun AND tomato." All I can get is "prun OR tomato."

Well, this is interesting. This time when I entered prun tomato I got TWO threads (two where I've talked about this search) instead of 330. I was double checking the advanced search. I'll have to explore this some more. Not that it HELPS to get just these two threads when I'm looking for prune pruning tomato and tomatoes.

I just typed in "trimming tomatoes" selected the forums "vegetable gardening" and the "tomato" forum and pulled up 66 threads. Which forums did you select?

Well, I've tried this and that and I can only get 2 hits instead of the 330 I got over and over two days ago. I think I give up. But for me this is a serious deficiency. I'm going to explore GardenWeb and AllThingsPlants a little more carefully for their search behavior.

YOu know Las14, I put a link to a pruning tomato thread in my first post. When you do the search - try typing (prune tomatoes) and see if you get the search you are looking for. Prun isn't a word. Omit the + and use parenthesis.

I really spent a good deal of time figuring out how to do this step by step. I'm so sorry it wasn't good enough for you.

I just put in (prune tomatoes) selected the tomato forum and pulled up 236 posts. Go figure.

OK, I checked AllthingsPlants and GardenWeb. I didn't spend a lot of time. +prun and +tomat turned up no hits in Garden Web. AllThingsPlants looked promising as almost all hits had both words in them, but there were a few where "Find on this page" didn't find one or the other.

Elsie, thanks for your efforts. But I want to use prun to get prune and pruning. And tomat to get tomato and tomatoes.

When I put in my original post I realize now I shouldn't have tried "prun tomato." That would look for a phrase that would never be found except in these threads where I'm talking about it.

LAS, we are looking to add exact phrase (within quotes) searching as soon as possible.

As far as "fuzzy" logic searching, where you can search for partial words...I'm not sure we can do that without really bogging down our search engine. We have that within some of our features, such as PlantFiles and Garden Watchdog, but those searches are limited to a much smaller pool of possible matches.

Great. Glad to hear it. And what about required words? So I could search for places that had both pruning AND tomato? I'd do a second search for both prune and tomato.... and then tomatoes...

We're going to see what is possible, but I think adding the specific phrase search will address most of our needs, even if we can't easily incorporate the other more sophisticated searches.

You may already know this, but you can limit your search to a particular forum or group of forums with the Advanced Search. Using your example, you could search for prune (or pruning) just within the Tomatoes forum, or hold down your Ctrl key and use your mouse to highlight and select as many forums to search within as you wish (e.g., vegetables, heirlooms, and tomatoes) all at once.

It would be nice to limit the search to a range of dates also. Combing through countless pages/threads is very time consuming.

I can view threads I posted to (on My Info page) but cannot search for keywords which is another sore point. Even though I can filter to a specific forum there may be pages and pages of threads to comb through.

If I put a made up name like "xyz" in the search box on the home page I get a bunch of junk too. This does not instill confidence in the search option.

Yes, we don't want to ask for the practically impossible, but I think the convention of the + for words that are required in your search is fairly common, and not that difficult programmatically. And it would be SO helpful. Just restricting to forums eliminates articles and such like. Anyway, thanks for being responsive. I trust this request has already been passed on to the over-worked techies?? :-)

LAS

If you use the Advanced Search you can limit by date.

You can search for keywords from any page within our forums. If you then click on Advanced Search, you can limit it to one user (even yourself) and further restrict it by date and/or forum.

I'm being somewhat tongue in cheek, but then again I'm not: if you put "junk" in the search (just a bunch of random letters), then you'll probably get bad results. Try searching for a bona fide word using the tips I gave you here, and I think you'll get the results you're looking for. If you need further help, let us know.

Let's take this one step at a time.

Have you tried the tips I gave you above? I think you'll find that they can help you locate what the types of results you're looking for, whether you're just rooting around through old stuff for useful nuggets of info, or if you're trying to home in on a specific thread.

As I mentioned, we will look at the feasibility of giving members the ability to search for exact phrases and not just one-word phrases.

As to the other Boolean operators, I could be wrong but I think the reasons Dave did away with them years ago were:

1. Most users are NOT familiar with using them (double quotes for exact phrases notwithstanding); and
2. They created a significant slowdown in the speed of the search.

If that's still the case, then I can't justify asking the techs to re-introduce search features that aren't all that common or familiar and creating slower searches for everyone.

Hi Terry, your advice did help some but there are still some things that could be improved on.

The one thing that comes to mind is a picture I know I posted on DG years ago but could not find it with DG's search engine just a couple of months ago. I finally gave up at looking at all the threads the DG search gave me so I went to Google and searched for my user ID, Dave's Garden, and the keywords I was looking for. BOOM! I found it on DG using Google in 2 seconds. The power of Google to scour the web is simply mind boggling.

#1 is putting the advanced search option on the home page. Pretty bad to go "searching" for the advanced search option. It appears the search on the Home Page is intended for certain things, but what are they? To get to the advanced search option I had to drill down to Communities, Forums, click on the search button, and then finally see an advanced option.

The search box under My Info, "View the Threads you are Watching" does not search the threads I am watching for instance but rather the entire forums community which seems misleading since I will get more threads than what I really wanted to comb through looking for that one thread I was interested in 3 years ago.

#2 if you put junk or nothing in a search box and no match is found then you should get a "no match found" back.

#3 the date range helps somewhat but it would be nice to have more options such as > "date", < "date", and between "date1" and "date2"

Comparing our internal search to Google is a bit like comparing a high school football team to a professional team. Google has vast (and I mean vast) resources and the only thing they do is searches. And so they do searches very, very well.

We run a site that has a vast array of features and forums. Being able to search our site is an important component of using our site, but not to everyone. Some users are more concerned with the PlantFiles or the Garden Watchdog features, or the intricacies of using their journal or building their own Garden Showcase, etc.

There's simply no way that we can have the level of sophistication of Google's search. Wish we could, but we simply can't.

The home search doesn't assume that you want to search only forums, so it gives you a sampling of results from many areas of the site, with the option to "see more" by clicking links beneath those results.

The forum search (and advanced forum search) is only found within the forum area. Speaking personally, that still seems the most logical approach to me, even though it involves a few more clicks than perhaps we would like to have.

The "View threads you are watching" is a browse, not a search. Those are two distinct things. And that area is also a way for you to manage your watched threads (you can unwatch threads by clicking on the box to the left of any of them.)

Yes I understand Google is a mega company but it is also another resource to use when you can't find something using the conventional tools on DG.

Just thought another user might be able to use that power as well if they get frustrated trying to find something that they remembered seeing but now cannot find it after years go by.

Funny thing is how I found all this "stuff" out. I could not find a particular plant picture that I wanted to send an email correspondent on my own hard drive because apparently I did not name it when I imported it (kind of remembered the year it could've been but looking at thousands of images is frustrating in itself) but I do remember posting it on DG so I thought a DG search would quickly find it. That led to more frustration so I thought I would give Google a try and it found it in a nanosecond (well maybe a little bit more than that).

It's good to have more options at hand in this age of instant gratification.

hcmcdole, yes, I agree with using Google when you can't find it using our search tools :-)