# Search option pet peeve

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/search-option-pet-peeve/375599>\
**Category:** About This Message Board\
**Created:** [October 7, 2006, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/search-option-pet-peeve/375599 "2006-10-07T10:44:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![bbs2k](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e495f1/32.png) [@bbs2k](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bbs2k)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2006, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/search-option-pet-peeve/375599/1 "2006-10-07T10:44:33Z")

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Search option pet peeve: I love the “Ask the…” threads. So I wanted to just do a thread search to find a couple old ones to browse through. No zombie thread rising goin’ on here, just browsing. When I try to do a thread search with just “ask the” it tells “The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search : ask, the”

Is there any way to manipulate around this without being more specific?

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**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2006, 11:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/search-option-pet-peeve/375599/2 "2006-10-07T11:59:58Z")

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You could go to IMHO (where most such threads are found), set the Display Options (at the bottom of the page) to “Sorted By: Thread Title”, “Sort By: Ascending”, and “From the” to some greater period than the default of the “Last Day”, then find the pages which contain the “Ask the…” threads.

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**Author:** ![SkipMagic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skipmagic/32/20706_2.png) [@SkipMagic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SkipMagic)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2006, 12:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/search-option-pet-peeve/375599/3 "2006-10-07T12:28:23Z")

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For a quick reference of a lot of the threads, you could also check out the list **Idle Thoughts** created for his [The “Ask the…” Anthology](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=6815127) thread. It’s pretty impressive.

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**Author:** ![bbs2k](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e495f1/32.png) [@bbs2k](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bbs2k)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2006, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/search-option-pet-peeve/375599/4 "2006-10-07T12:40:44Z")

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Thank you both, the answers were great… I’ll be happy to see this thread sink.