Just a heads up to anyone who hasn’t realized it.
Now that Google is crawling through these here boards, I’ve found it works far far better than our poor gasping one-legged-hamster-powered search function. I needed to look up a thread I started a while ago, so I started a search here. After five minutes or so of waiting for a response, I googled a few key words, along with my name, and up popped my thread as the first hit.
So when you can’t get the asthmatic swine-flu-ravaged wheelchair-bound little critter to run, keep that in mind.
You could have a point, I Googled ‘are scalar weapons for real’ and found this classic instantly. Using the SDMB search, not so lucky.
The only annoying this is when we’re discussing a topic, I google that topic, and it turns out nobody else is discussing it because the thread I’m participating in is the first hit. :smack:
Furthermore, if you search for 1920s-style death rays (which a person is much more likely to need to find), it comes up as the sixth hit on Google. Even when the built-in search engine is working, it’ll just give you pages and pages of people using the expression, or the poster who took his name from it, but lots of luck finding the origin.
Maybe everyone knows this already, but you can limit a Google search to the Straight Dope by adding site:straightdope.com to your keywords. You can search for threads with the keywords in the title by preceding them with allintitle:
Besides not timing out or returning error messages, Google allows you to search for short words, so in a search for <twa 800 fbi cia bush> or <hi opal i burn your dog>, it won’t discard all your terms.
ETA: Those were random examples. No support of conspiracy theorists or ill will toward OpalCat’s hypothetical dog is implied and none should be inferred.
Cool! Good to know.
Pardon me, I’m off to listen to Duran Duran’s “Airplane on a Treadmill.”
Even better, use site:boards.straightdope.com to limit the search to the message boards themselves.