To find this extant thread I went to the search popdown and typed “ask the guy science fiction” (no quotes). Useless irrelevant hits. Advanced Search: umm, yeah I could put my name. WTF are “tags”?? Where do I specify a string that is in the title and where instead might I specify a string that appears somewhere within the thread? Various attempts.
Gave up, went to Google. First search got me hits for “Ask the Guy who is Pretty Good at SF Story Identification”. Links were dead, though.
Copied the name of the damn thread from Google and re-searched in SDMB and this time it found it. (I had been remembering “science fiction” and it was “sf” in the thread title).
All this as preface to saying: if, in the longer arc of things, no rush and no hurry, it became possible to hook this place up with a better search engine, ideally a full-on boolean search window that would let you specify time frame, user name, forum, etc, that would be really cool and I’d appreciate it very much.
Actually I should not get all these, since Google doesn’t let me search for words “just in the title”. But I should certainly get that first one, “We should end homelessness in America”.
The problem is that it’s searching for a complete match. It’s looking for a topic with the title “We should end homelessness in America” posted by you. But you didn’t post the topic.
Yes, I realize that. But the search engine doesn’t give me the option of “search for a thread with the following text in the thread title, within which the poster AHunter3 has posted at least once”.
