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- Aug 24, 2003
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Guide to Searching the Anabolic-Enhancement Forums
INTRODUCTION
There is a lot of useful information in the Anabolic-Enhancement Forums. In fact, just about every question you have has probably already been asked and answered somewhere in the forums. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find these informative threads.
The best way to find information about a topic is to search. You can get to the search page by clicking "search" at the top of any forum page and then clicking "advanced search". Unfortunately, the search page can be difficult to use. In this guide I will give some tips and advice on how to effectively use the search page.
(Note: You can also search by clicking "search" and then typing in the "quick search" box directly below, but for reasons I will get to later, this is usually not a good idea.)
SEARCHING TITLES
On the search page directly below the "Keywords" box, you have the choice to either "Search Entire Post" or "Search Titles Only". It is almost always better to search only the titles! The problem is that entire post searches will return off-topic results.
For example, if you are looking for information on calipers, and you search the entire posts, you'll probably just get a bunch of journals that happen to mention the word "calipers". Posts that mention calipers in their titles are much more likely to contain useful information about them.
BOOLEAN SEARCH
If you enter multiple keywords in the search box, by default you will get a list of results that contain at least one of the words, but not necessarily all the words. Sometimes this is not what you want! In these cases, you want to use a Boolean Search.
For example, if you are looking for information on "sugar alcohol", and you do a normal search, you will get a bunch of results about sugar, a bunch of results about alcohol, and maybe -- if you're lucky -- a result about sugar alcohol. Instead, if you enclose the phrase with the Boolean Search operator " and search for "sugar alcohol", you will get only results containing that exact phrase.
Here is a detailed look at Boolean search operators
The Boolean full-text search capability supports the following operators:
+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each post that is returned.
-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the posts that are returned.
> <
These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a post. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.
( )
Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
~
A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the post's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking ?noise? words. A post containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.
*
The asterisk serves as the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected.
"
A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (?"?) characters matches only posts that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. The full-text engine splits the phrase into words, performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. The engine then performs a substring search for the phrase in the records that are found, so the match must include non-word characters in the phrase. For example, "test phrase" does not match "test, phrase". If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. For example, if all words are either stopwords or shorter than the minimum length of indexed words, the result is empty.
The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use Boolean full-text operators:
apple banana
Find posts that contain at least one of the two words.
+apple +juice
Find posts that contain both words.
+apple macintosh
Find posts that contain the word ?apple?, but rank posts higher if they also contain ?macintosh?.
+apple -macintosh
Find posts that contain the word ?apple? but not ?macintosh?.
+apple +(>turnover <strudel)
Find posts that contain the words ?apple? and ?turnover?, or ?apple? and ?strudel? (in any order), but rank ?apple turnover? higher than ?apple strudel?.
apple*
Find posts that contain words such as ?apple?, ?apples?, ?applesauce?, or ?applet?.
"some words"
Find posts that contain the exact phrase ?some words? (for example, posts that contain ?some words of wisdom? but not ?some noise words?).
Some words are ignored in full-text searches:
Any word that is too short is ignored. The minimum length of words that are found by full-text searches on Anabolic-Enhancement is two characters.
Words in the stopword list are ignored. A stopword is a word such as ?the? or ?some? that is so common that it is considered to have zero semantic value.
USER STALKING
A good way to browse generally for information is to pick a helpful user and then search for posts by them. You can do this easily on the search page by doing a "Search by User Name" and then typing in their username. It's generally best to leave the keywords box empty when you do this.
SHOWING RESULTS AS POSTS
Another useful search option is to show results as posts instead of threads. This is a simple option found near the bottom of the search page. It can have two big advantages: 1) it enables you to jump to a specific post in a long thread 2) a short snippet of text from the post is displayed, which can help you decide whether you want to read the post without clicking on it.
For example, you might want to jump to a specific post about "creatine" in Liftsiron's journal. Another example where this search option is effective is when it is combined with user stalking: the short text snippets are often enough to decide which posts you should read.
CONCLUSION
There are other options on the search page that you should experiment with, but I have found these search types to be the most helpful.
The problem with using quick search instead of the search page is that it doesn't allow you to use powerful features like searching titles, showing results as posts, or user stalking. By combining these advanced search options you can drastically improve the effectiveness of your searches. This is good for you, because you will learn faster, and it is good for everyone else too, because they will not have to answer the same questions over and over again.
by dan swanton
INTRODUCTION
There is a lot of useful information in the Anabolic-Enhancement Forums. In fact, just about every question you have has probably already been asked and answered somewhere in the forums. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find these informative threads.
The best way to find information about a topic is to search. You can get to the search page by clicking "search" at the top of any forum page and then clicking "advanced search". Unfortunately, the search page can be difficult to use. In this guide I will give some tips and advice on how to effectively use the search page.
(Note: You can also search by clicking "search" and then typing in the "quick search" box directly below, but for reasons I will get to later, this is usually not a good idea.)
SEARCHING TITLES
On the search page directly below the "Keywords" box, you have the choice to either "Search Entire Post" or "Search Titles Only". It is almost always better to search only the titles! The problem is that entire post searches will return off-topic results.
For example, if you are looking for information on calipers, and you search the entire posts, you'll probably just get a bunch of journals that happen to mention the word "calipers". Posts that mention calipers in their titles are much more likely to contain useful information about them.
BOOLEAN SEARCH
If you enter multiple keywords in the search box, by default you will get a list of results that contain at least one of the words, but not necessarily all the words. Sometimes this is not what you want! In these cases, you want to use a Boolean Search.
For example, if you are looking for information on "sugar alcohol", and you do a normal search, you will get a bunch of results about sugar, a bunch of results about alcohol, and maybe -- if you're lucky -- a result about sugar alcohol. Instead, if you enclose the phrase with the Boolean Search operator " and search for "sugar alcohol", you will get only results containing that exact phrase.
Here is a detailed look at Boolean search operators
The Boolean full-text search capability supports the following operators:
+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each post that is returned.
-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the posts that are returned.
> <
These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a post. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.
( )
Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
~
A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the post's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking ?noise? words. A post containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.
*
The asterisk serves as the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected.
"
A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (?"?) characters matches only posts that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. The full-text engine splits the phrase into words, performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. The engine then performs a substring search for the phrase in the records that are found, so the match must include non-word characters in the phrase. For example, "test phrase" does not match "test, phrase". If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. For example, if all words are either stopwords or shorter than the minimum length of indexed words, the result is empty.
The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use Boolean full-text operators:
apple banana
Find posts that contain at least one of the two words.
+apple +juice
Find posts that contain both words.
+apple macintosh
Find posts that contain the word ?apple?, but rank posts higher if they also contain ?macintosh?.
+apple -macintosh
Find posts that contain the word ?apple? but not ?macintosh?.
+apple +(>turnover <strudel)
Find posts that contain the words ?apple? and ?turnover?, or ?apple? and ?strudel? (in any order), but rank ?apple turnover? higher than ?apple strudel?.
apple*
Find posts that contain words such as ?apple?, ?apples?, ?applesauce?, or ?applet?.
"some words"
Find posts that contain the exact phrase ?some words? (for example, posts that contain ?some words of wisdom? but not ?some noise words?).
Some words are ignored in full-text searches:
Any word that is too short is ignored. The minimum length of words that are found by full-text searches on Anabolic-Enhancement is two characters.
Words in the stopword list are ignored. A stopword is a word such as ?the? or ?some? that is so common that it is considered to have zero semantic value.
USER STALKING
A good way to browse generally for information is to pick a helpful user and then search for posts by them. You can do this easily on the search page by doing a "Search by User Name" and then typing in their username. It's generally best to leave the keywords box empty when you do this.
SHOWING RESULTS AS POSTS
Another useful search option is to show results as posts instead of threads. This is a simple option found near the bottom of the search page. It can have two big advantages: 1) it enables you to jump to a specific post in a long thread 2) a short snippet of text from the post is displayed, which can help you decide whether you want to read the post without clicking on it.
For example, you might want to jump to a specific post about "creatine" in Liftsiron's journal. Another example where this search option is effective is when it is combined with user stalking: the short text snippets are often enough to decide which posts you should read.
CONCLUSION
There are other options on the search page that you should experiment with, but I have found these search types to be the most helpful.
The problem with using quick search instead of the search page is that it doesn't allow you to use powerful features like searching titles, showing results as posts, or user stalking. By combining these advanced search options you can drastically improve the effectiveness of your searches. This is good for you, because you will learn faster, and it is good for everyone else too, because they will not have to answer the same questions over and over again.
by dan swanton
