# Is there a page explaining the search engine? **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [December 27, 2006, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754 "2006-12-27T16:07:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/1 "2006-12-27T16:07:16Z")
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] Anyway, can you help me out? -FrL- ---
**Author:** ![Gfactor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/2 "2006-12-27T16:39:27Z")
_hot cross buns_ gets you only results that include all three. AFAIK there is no way to search for a phrase. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 4:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/3 "2006-12-27T16:43:36Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Gfactor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/4 "2006-12-27T16:58:03Z")
[QUOTE=yabob] 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. [/QUOTE] 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. ---
**Author:** ![Gfactor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/5 "2006-12-27T17:19:45Z")
[QUOTE=Gfactor] There are several threads on how the search syntax works, btw. [/QUOTE] [How to search for a particular phrase ?](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=400271) (you can’t) ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/6 "2006-12-27T17:29:57Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![yabob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yabob/32/2821_2.png) [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 5:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/7 "2006-12-27T17:39:44Z")
Oh, and “rubber OR baby” (without the quotes) returns 750 results. ---
**Author:** ![Gfactor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@Gfactor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gfactor)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/8 "2006-12-27T17:47:52Z")
[QUOTE=yabob] 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. [/QUOTE] That’s consistent with the results of my experiments, too. Hmmm . . . ---
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2006, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/9 "2006-12-27T19:46:45Z")
Highlighting is really separate from the search. Here’s a link that’ll redisplay this thread with “and” and “the” highlighted. [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=401751&highlight=and+the](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=401751&highlight=and+the) ---
**Author:** ![xash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c6cbf5/32.png) [@xash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xash)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2006, 7:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/10 "2006-12-28T07:40:20Z")
This thread might shed some light: How do you do “exact phrase” searches on this board? > **[How do you do “exact phrase” searches on this board?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=392485)** > > The search function on SDMB finds threads with any of the keywords entered. There are times when I want to find something with all the keywords or the exact phrase. Google lets you use quotes for an exact phrase, but that doesn’t work here. How... ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [December 28, 2006, 10:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-page-explaining-the-search-engine/385754/11 "2006-12-28T22:58:46Z")
[QUOTE=xash] This thread might shed some light: How do you do “exact phrase” searches on this board? > **[How do you do “exact phrase” searches on this board?](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=392485)** > > The search function on SDMB finds threads with any of the keywords entered. There are times when I want to find something with all the keywords or the exact phrase. Google lets you use quotes for an exact phrase, but that doesn’t work here. How... [/QUOTE] It still says, “you can’t.” 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.