How to search this site, a guide for newbies

[RogerMcAllen]

A lot of times new members, or even old ones, are looking for some information that has been discussed dozens of times before. It is often tiresome to answer the same question over and over again, and people are sent to "search the forums". Quite honestly, I'll say that the search feature on this site is a piece of junk. I am going to be away for a week at Thanksgiving, and was looking for some advice on vacation feeding. I typed "vacation feeding" into the AA search engine and came up with 3816 matches, many of which had nothing to do with how to handle feeding of your aquatic friends for the duration of your trip. I then went over to www.google.com, and used their search withing a site feature (after you type in your keywords enter site:www.siteyouraresearching.com). Into the regular google search bar I typed: vacation feeding site:www.aquariumadvice.com . This gave me 17 good results.

Please not that this post is in no way discouraging the asking of questions or trying to criticize our current search feature. I just thought it would be a helpful bit of information.

 

[fishfreek]

Roger, If you search using the above search feature and you put in "vacation feeding" and then pick the "Search for all term" button you will get 32 responses. If you dont pick the search for all terms button then you will find all posts with the word vacation OR feeding in them.

 

[RogerMcAllen]

I though that there must have been something goofy going on when I got several thousand. Perhaps I should pay more attention next time, I didn't even see that option.

 

[fishfreek]

WE are also google friendly in that you can search google from the home page. On the left if you scroll some. Enter your search text and then pick google from the dropdown list.

 

[TankGirl]

It is amazing to me how often I will do a google on any kind of fishy term, and in the first 4 links an AA thread will be listed!

The thing that gets me, and maybe this should be in the "site help" forum, but when I select a particular FW forum to search within, it still pulls up threads from the SW forums.