Beginners' Guide to Searching the Forums

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Rumpelteazer
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Joined: Mon Aug 24, 2009 5:30 pm
Group: Cheltenham
Location: Gloucestershire, UK

Beginners' Guide to Searching the Forums

Postby Rumpelteazer » Sun Dec 13, 2009 12:49 pm

Simple Search
Let’s start with a simple search for a single word – “conscience”. All you need to do is to type the word into the search box on the top right of the screen, and then press the Search button.

Search for conscience.jpg
Search for conscience.jpg (116.52 KiB) Viewed 5087 times

This will produce a list of all the posts containing this word.

Search found conscience.jpg
Search found conscience.jpg (192.73 KiB) Viewed 5087 times

Look down the list of posts. If there is one you are interested in, click on the title to read the whole topic. Let’s suppose you choose “Cheltenham Group Meeting 12/11/09 – Life”. You will jump straight to the relevant part of this topic. Notice that the word “Conscience” is highlighted.

Search result conscience.jpg
Search result conscience.jpg (165.69 KiB) Viewed 5087 times

Advanced Search
The main problem with the simple method of searching is that it often brings up a lot of things that are not what you are looking for. You can use the Advanced Search facility to focus your search on the most likely forum areas. Suppose this time that you are looking specifically for papers on “attachment”.
Step 1: Click on “Advanced Search”, just below the Search box.

Advanced search large.jpg
Advanced search large.jpg (110.89 KiB) Viewed 5087 times

A form will come up looking like this:

Search for attachment.jpg
Search for attachment.jpg (183.66 KiB) Viewed 5087 times

Step 2: Type the word “attachment” into the “Search for Keywords” box. Now scroll down the “Search in Forums” box until you see “Archive papers”. This is a main forum which contains sub-forums with all the archive papers in them. Click on “Archive papers” to select this forum, and make sure the button marked Search subforums is set to “Yes”.

Step 3: Now press the “Search” button at the bottom of the form. This will bring up a list of topics.

Search result attachment.jpg
Search result attachment.jpg (183.11 KiB) Viewed 5087 times

You will see that the Index to New York papers contains a paper on the subject of Attachment. (The other entries are all from the Index to FCR papers which are not currently available on line – they are planned for 2010).

Tips for even more advanced searching
Using Advanced Search you can:
  • Enter more than one word to be searched for, in which case both words must be found.
  • Enter several search terms with similar meanings – e.g. “attachment identification”. Select the “Search for any terms” button below the “Search for Keywords” box to make sure you look for papers that contain any of these words.
  • Enter part of a word with an asterisk meaning 'match anything'. For example “attach*” would find “attachment” or “attached”.
  • Select several different forums or subforums for your search. Click on the first one to select it. Then hold down the Ctrl key and (continuing to hold the Ctrl down) click on all the other forums or subforums that you want your search to cover, scrolling down if necessary. Release the Ctrl key. All the forums you want to search should be highlighted.

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