Searching for posts

I know I used to be able to search posts, but I haven't figured out how to do so now. Is it no longer possible?

There's a search box in the upper right-hand corner above this thread. You can use it to search all DG forums for a particular word (more than 4 letters), words, or phrase (put it in double quote marks).

After you run that search, you'll see fields to narrow it down by poster, forum, and whether the word/phrase appears in the text or the subject line.

(You can shortcut straight to that more advanced search from any forum--just look in the colored bar of links near the top, and look for the Search link.)

Ooops! What Terry said. :o)

Scroll up and look to the right side of the page for the text box and Search Forums button.

Is that what you mean? If you go to the other parts of the site, you see a different search box. You have to be in the forums to search them. I found that a bit confusing for a while.

This message was edited Oct 28, 2008 4:15 PM

I found it, thanks.

Has the search forum been temporarily inactivated? It is no longer working for me.

Yes, Dave has temporarily suspended it. If you try to search, you'll see the following note:

I try the search periodically in hope it is working again. Do we have a projected turning it back on time? Last night I spent almost an hour looking for a specific post that I had seen another time. I knew I was going shopping today and needed to make a list of ingredients for the plant food recipe in that post.

searching for a particular wont be easy, if you are able to do it at all... but i have found that if i am searching for a plant in PF, you can find it by using google [or your fave search engine]
when ever I search that way... it always has a link to Dave's Plantfiles, and i can locate the plant i'm looking for.
especially since this search is down.

If i am looking for something particular in a thread.... especially a thread i know i have posted in before.. I go into
MyInfo | View the Posts I"ve Made | and you will have to narrow it down to a particular form... that narrows it down so you are not searching possibly hundreds of thread.... but i have been able to find things that way too.

I have to second the google idea. I type in: pride of barbados, davesgarden

Typically the first link is to plantfiles and the 2nd (and maybe more) link is a thread from the forum.

Dave or other Admin,
I'm not sure how search engines work...does it charge your company every time we "google" you? I don't want to cost you $.

There's no cost to us for you to use Google to search our site, and their advanced search works pretty good, assuming they've had time to index whatever you're looking for. (Google's Advanced Search lets you limit your search to one domain.)

The DG search engines for the various features (PlantFiles, BugFiles, Garden Watchdog, Garden Bookworm, Go Gardening, PlantScout, Marketplace, etc.) are still up and running, it's just the site-wide search that has been disabled.

I really miss it, too. I am like the lady who is looking for the recipe to a soil less mix.....or something like that. But...I have to admit I never had any success because I didn't know to put it in quotes.

If you have the Google Toolbar installed, it makes fast work of searching DG or any site you're on. You just type in your search term and then click the icon that shows a magnifying glass with eyes on it. That limits search results to the website you're on when you do the search.

If you don't have that installed, you can type site:davesgarden.com and then your search term; that modifier ensures that only hits coming from DG will show up in your results. If you put your term and davesgarden in a search, any site that contains the term plus davesgarden will show up, including pages that link to DG.

This message was edited Nov 23, 2008 1:16 AM

I will try to remember all of that and maybe try it. Thanks

Terry,

Will Dave be reinstating the search? I use it all the time instead of starting new thread, since oftentimes the answers that I am looking for are already there.

My guess (and hope!) is yes he will.

It's pretty important to us as administrators, as well as to members, to be able to search the site using key words ;o)

GW, thanks for that info on the google search. I never knew what that was for. Good to know.

I'm looking for a soil recipie, too . . . the search feature is something I use ALOT!!

As for the google toolbar . . . I've noticed that when anything like that - be it google, yahoo, etc - is downloaded, my pc starts having issues with speed (as well as any "other" programs that are attached to that toolbar). Once those programs are removed, then my pc works like it should.

Looking back thru all "my posts" would be a full time job, as I post alot on the African Violet forum, and to read the past few hundred posts I've made to find a particular subject would take up time I could use for other gardening purposes (not to mention work, 'cause I usually sneak in quite a few posts during the day!). That's why I like the search feature - like Terry, I can type in a phrase I know was used in a particular discussion, and the results would narrow my choices down to just a few.

I will try to search using google's advanced search . . .

...and I also suggest using the "tags" when you find the thread or post or article you were searching for, and give it a tagname you can remember. Even if/when the search feature is re-activated, those tags can come in handy ;o)

You know . . . I always remember the Tag feature when I'm reading an article, but keep forgetting about the threads!

Me too hoping the search feature is reactivated soon. I use it all the time.

I have saved certain threads as favorites in my browser - that has worked very well for threads that I want to reference over and over. I have also changed a thread from watched to Marked as Unread and it stays at to the top of my watched threads. Luckily I only have a couple of those. But it is working well for recipes that I will never remember where they were.

sometimes you do not know when you read a thread that it will be pertinent later. That is why I had to spend so much time reading back thru old threads to find what I had remembered reading in the past.

There is that . . . the thread I'm looking for didn't matter at the time, 'cause I still had plenty of soil mix left . . . but now I'm wanting to mix my own, and want to refer back to it . . . I will find it, though! One way or another! ^_^

Google's toolbar is not like other toolbars; it doesn't add a bunch of junk to your system. It runs efficiently and won't slow you down. I've used it on both Internet Explorer and Firefox for as long as Google's offered it.

Yes, and the tags feature here is really handy!

I still don't understand tags. Because when I look in the 'tags' there are a billion so how will I find mine?

If you go to your member page (click on your username, or the "my info" link at the top of the page you'll see a link to view the pages you've tagged.

ahhhhhhhhhh thanks so much ecrane3. I will try that. I lose so many good threads that I want to refer to as they pass down through the pages. That's why I luv the search so much because I do remember a unique word/phrase in a thread that I can search to find them again. I also find it so helpful for plants that I'm not familar with because I can search a forum without asking a question that's probably been answered many times before (as already mentioned).

Oh, this not being able to search in forums is getting very frustrating! I just spent over half my lunch looking for a posting I made, but can't find. I know if the search feature was active, this wouldn't have taken but 3 seconds!

If you made the post, you should be able to find it from your member page. Click on the link to view your posts, and then you can narrow it down by forum.

Well, yes, except there are 33 pages of just that forum . . . and I don't know the exact date I made the post . . . I think it was September, maybe October, on about the night of or day after the 2nd Wednesday of the month . . . I'll just have to continue once I get the kids put to bed tonite. :-(

Syrumani ... another thing you may want to try is... once you've got one of those 33 pages loaded, and narrowed down to roughly the right time frame.. you can use the 'search' function in your browser IF you recall a term you may have used in the topic line.

I use it all the time to find a specific term .... it should work too for topics as it would be a 'word' on the current page.
But you will have to recall at least one tern in your thread's topic line.

if you are not familiar with the search... just click the Ctrl key along with "F"
and that will open the Find Box.

Oh, I use the "find" feature all the time . . . it comes in handy for the game threads, or a specific term I am sure was used in a particular thread. But in this case, I know at some point in the past 3 months that I have said something about Blackberry Jam african violet leaves, and the searches thru Google only seem to come up with recipe postings, or plant files pix with "blackberry" or "jam" in the titles. At least I know at which point during a month I would have said it, 'cause the second Wednesday of each month is the local AV club meetings . . . and I like to share the news if I win anything in the raffle . . . If I don't find it by next Wednesday, I will just ask someone at the meeting if they remember which month it was . . .

JMHO, but I do find it frustrating that we can't use the search feature for forums (or in My Tools/My Info), and hope that "temporarily" doesn't last much longer! ^_^

I just did an advanced Google search using key works, searching only davesgarden ... and i found nothing with Blackberry Jam, in the past year.

not sure if this link will work, but it will show the search.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1B3GGGL_en___US222&as_q=&as_epq=Syrumani&as_oq=%22African+Violets%22+%22Blackberry+Jam%22+leaves&as_eq=&num=50&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=davesgarden.com&as_qdr=y&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=off

As a fairly new member of the DG writers group, I really miss the search feature, too! I really need to be able to search for similar topics, and make sure no one else has already done something very similar, or has already started planning or writing an article on it. Hard to do without reading through the entire thread post by post!

Using the ctrl key + "f" key will help you find a key word in a given thread. And the articles area has its own search, so you can look through past articles for key words to see if something has already been covered.

I guess the Biggie Question is: is the search feature ever coming back? I understand why Dave disabled it but I think alot of us are wondering. Thanks muchly

Thanks, guys, but I do know how to search within a thread. It's finding the correct thread in the first place that I'm wanting to do! Now, if someone knows how to do a Google search within davesgarden.com, limited to a certain forum, for a certain phrase made by a specific user, THEN maybe I wouldn't miss that search feature so much!

Whether the search feature within the forums is ever "reactivated" or not is up to Dave and the Admin people. I have no control over that. All I can say is that I've been able to learn more and faster because I could search within a specific forum for even a general search term, let alone search for a posting that I'VE made within a forum, without having to look thru each and every posting I've made . . .

The search engine is one of those things that crops up as a problem from time to time. The issue is that it is searching through almost 6 million posts each time you make a search, and sometimes it gets bogged down.

That wouldn't be a problem, except that while a search is happening, nobody else can pull up a thread or even the DG homepage, until the search is complete. So if a search takes, say, 10 seconds, then during that 10 seconds nobody can load any page on the site that has anything to do with the forums.

But then people are in a queue, waiting for the database to finish the search, and more and more people are getting queued up which makes the server even busier.

When it gets really bogged down, searches can take over 100 seconds and then people are waiting almost 2 minutes for their homepage or a thread to load. That is when I do drastic things like disable the search.

The proper solution is to create a second table in the database and populate it with the entire contents of all the posts, and then have that table only used for searching. It would double the size of my database and take quite a bit of work to program.

I have at least 4 major TODOs on my desk, and one of them has to be done by tomorrow evening and will take almost all my time between now and then.

So, there's the update for now.

dave

**ops... triple post.

the "sent post" screen never came up... so i assumed they never 'went'.

sorry 'bout that.

This message was edited Dec 2, 2008 10:16 AM

ops... triple post

This message was edited Dec 2, 2008 10:15 AM