Say I’m searching for “Hot cross buns.” When I put the phrase “Hot cross buns” into the search field, what I get back is every post with any of the three words in it, so in other words, I get every post with the word “hot” in it as well as every post with the word “cross” in it and so on.
Obviously, that’s not what I want.
So how do I search for specifically the phrase “hot cross buns?”
And, in general, how do I use the search engine.
I’m sorry I don’t already know this, but what can I say? I missed that day in class, and never raised my hand to admit I didn’t know it later on.
[back to school special]I can’t read, alright. I can’t read.[/special]
Actually, it performs the “and”. You will get articles with “cross” and “buns”. A point you missed is that it ignores words of three letters or less, noted at the top of your search results. Which is occasionally annoying. It does seem to honor double quotes, so you can search on “hot cross buns” (including the double quotes in your input) if you want that exact phrase.
Weird. At least for the search hot cross buns the results came back hot, cross, buns, but when I searched kiss the sky, it came back kiss, sky. OTOH “kiss the sky” apparently searched for all three words. The results highlighted instances of single words though.
There are several threads on how the search syntax works, btw.
In spite of what it says in that thread, the brief experiment I did before posting suggested that it honors double quotes - I searched for “rubber baby” with the quotes, and got 16 articles, mostly about tongue twisters, all containing the phrase. It DID highlight either “rubber” or “baby” in the text, even when not part of the phrase. Searching for “rubber baby” without the quotes returned 151 results. Perhaps something has changed recently.
Here’s a good one: I was looking for occurences of the phrase “war of all against all” in the same posts as ‘Iraq’. Since the board’s indexing ignores all ‘words’ of 3 or fewer letters, I was down to “against”. You know what came back? Apparently the board software doesn’t index a bunch of common words of 4 or more letters. ‘Against’ is one of those. Needless to say, doing a search just on ‘Iraq’ wasn’t gonna get me anywhere. Grumble, grumble.