In one of the innumerable gun threads we’ve had, someone (don’t remember who) asked me (can’t remember exact wording) what good it does anyone else for me to own a gun (don’t remember my reply). Can anyone help me find that exact post?
P.S. have search engines advanced yet to the point where they can recognize a paraphrase of a text string with the same natural language meaning?
I’d go to google with that one since you’re already going to have an issue since the board is going to ignore the word ‘gun’ (though I’m sure ‘guns’ was used plenty of times now that I think of it).
I’d search google with:
site:boards.straightdope.com “Lumpy” AND “guns” AND “_____”
replacing the underscored part with any keywords you can think of, keeping in mind that those words don’t have to be from the question you’re referring to or even the post, they just have to show up somewhere in the thread.
You can use the board’s software and put your name in the username part and then swap out keywords, but the two minute timer is going to be a PITA for something like this.
Any idea on approximate time period, forum, etc?
I think you’re attributing more complexity to Google search syntax than exists at this point.
Here’s Google’s own page on refining Web searches. AND (the Boolean operator) is not mentioned, but OR is, and quotations are only mentioned for exact phrases, not single words.
Google Advanced Search is able to do AND searches of individual words. It’s unreliable but so are all Google Searches ever since they decided they know better than we do what we are looking for when we search.
AND is a legal Google operator, but it’s redundant – it’s equivalent to just leaving it out.
i.e., X AND Y AND Z
is exactly equivalent to X Y Z
and in either case, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, it’s just ignored either way. As far as I can tell, it’s treated something like X OR Y OR Z because I get results that include any of the words, but I guess that responses with all the words are listed first.
But AHunter3 is right – Google tries to be too smart for its britches and makes all kinds of wild-ass assumptions that sometimes lead one off on wild goose chases.
Speaking of wild gooses, consider trying your search with DuckDuckGo –
I think it’s not so smart-ass, but it might not be as thorough at indexing everything in the universe.