Advanced Search Tips
For searches of more than one word, the default beahvior of search is to find all results which contain any of the words. For instance, searching for
title company pittsburgh pennsylvania
will return results that contain any of the words "title", "company", "pittsburgh", and "pennsylvania". The search will make an attempt to list the most relevant results at the top, but you might get more results than you really want with this kind of search.
Fortunately, there are several advanced searching techniques which can be used to obtain more precise search results for combinations of words.
If you want to find only those results which contain all of the words in a search, use the AND operator or precede words you want to require with +. For instance
title +company +pittsburgh
returns only results which contain all three of the words "title", "company", and "pittsburgh". The same results will also be returned by
title AND company AND pittsburgh
You can also exclude words with the NOT operator or by preceding the words to exclude with -. For instance
pittsburgh -pennsylvania
will return results which contain the word "pittsburgh" but not the word "pennsylvania". The same results will be returned by
pittsburgh NOT pennsylvania
You can search for exact phrases by containing a group of words in quotes. For instance:
"title company in pittsburgh pennsylvania"
will return only results with that exact phrase.
You can use the wild card character * to return all results which contain a word that starts with a given series of letters. For instance
pitts*
will return all results which contain "pittsburgh", "pittsburg", and "pittston".
Any or all of these techniques can be used in combination to create more complex searches. For instance
"title company" +pitts* -"title abstractor"
will return all results which contain the phrase "title company" and at least one word that starts with "pitts", but not the phrase "title abstractor".
Special Tokens:
There are a few special tokens that allow you to refine your search by criteria other than the text of the message.
You can search for the content of a particular author, by including a token of the form author:"author name" in your search. For instance
"title company" author:"robert franco"
will return results written by Robert Franco that contain the phrase "title company".
You can also narrow your search by the date of the post-- finding only messages before or after a certain date-- by including a token of the forms before:YYYY/MM/DD and/or after:YYYY/MM/DD, where YYYY is a 4-digit year, MM is a 2-digit month, and DD is a 2-digit day of the month. For instance
"title company" before:2007/01/31 after:2007/01/01
will return results containing the phrase "title company" written in January 2007.
Other useful stuff to know:
--Searches encompass the text of both the title and the body of posts.
--Searches are case insensitive. Don't worry about capitalizing everything the same as what you are searching for.
--Words three letters long or less are ignored by search, unless they are part of a longer phrase contained in quotes. For instance
title company in pitsburgh pennsylvania
will totally ignore the word "in".
--If any operator is used in the search, and no operator is applied to the first word or phrase in the search, the first word or phrase in the search is assumed to be required. For instance,
"title company" +pittsburgh +pennsylvania
is exactly equivalent to
+"title company" +pittsburgh +pennsylvania
--A maximum of 100 results are returned by a search. If you get 100 results, you should not assume that you have obtained all matching results, and you may want to refine your search.