How to Search Forums for Short Words

The problem with most of the forum software out there is that, for performance reasons, there is a minimum word length for search terms; for most this is 4 characters or more. This limitation is fine for most purposes but technology tends to be full of TLA's which makes searching a pain. An example recently; trying to help a user on the Movable Type forums I needed to look up previous posts about 403 errors. Searching within the forum for 403 returned no hits.

One trick is not to use the forums built in search facilities, but use Google instead. Most people that use Google do not know that you can limit your searches to a specific site by the following:

site:http://forums.sixapart.com <search>
this will find all occurrences of <search> on the site specified, for example:

site:http://forums.sixapart.com 403
helped me find all the posts about 403 errors in the forums.

For more information on this, and other useful search terms see: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

Leave a comment

Gallery

Recent Entries

  • Now on YouTube

    Once in while, when answering questions on the Movable Type IRC channel or the support forums I find it easier to show rather than tell,...

  • Using jQuery with Movable Type

    Introduction jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development Today...

  • HashTag now on GitHub

    I have moved the source code for HashTag from my private SVN over to GitHub. If you want to contribute any changes you can find...

  • HashTag 2.5 Released

    Version 2.5 of my HashTag plugin has now been released. See the Hash Tag Plugin project page for more information. The major change in 2.5...

  • Hash Tag Beta 2.5 Now With Scheduled Post Support

    I have now added support for scheduled publishing in my HashTag plugin. It is currently a beta and can be downloaded from this link HashTag...

Close