Proper search

Hi All,

I often see that when a member asks a question they are advised (rightly) to do a search. I use the search facility a lot however I wonder if I am doing something wrong as if I search for the syn value of something, although I will specifically choose to look under the appropriate 'syns' thread I end up with tons of postings and have to read through all of them (some several pages long) just to even find where my search criteria can be found then hope it answered the questions. This can be very tedious and take a long time. What am I doing wrong that I am not going directly too my query? Is there a better way?

Does that make any sense?

I generally search for syns in google and it picks out the page from minimins for me!

Firstly are you using the forum search or the site search? Secondaly , when you do a search are you choosing to look for individual posts rather than threads? I search for threads and yes there may be a lots of results but you can usually discount lots just by the thread title. it is obvious if they are someone's food diary or a recipe for instance. So even just looking at the titles should help identify those that might be more useful. And you don't need to read them all in detail, just scan them. Putting your cursor over the thread title gives a popup of the first few lines and again this helps narrow it down. And of course being selective about which forums you search in and your search terms will also help.

I use Google as well.

type in

syns XXXXXXX site: www dot minimins.com/slimming-world
(XXXXXXX is where you put whatever the thing is that you want to syn)

Where I have put "dot" above, just put a . - it came out funny when I tried to type in the address properly!

and Google will just search the SW section of Minimins for you.

You can use the Advanced Search facility to narrow it down to just the last week or the last month if you want to.

Thanks everyone

I'll try the google one as I am more or less doing what you have suggested Circe....just find it rather cumbersome. So searches are easy but others....takes forever.

The minimins site search (not powered by google), cannot do a search for "syn" because its too short.

If you do a google search and select "MiniMins.com Site Search" it will only return results from MiniMins.

As suggested by Circes, show post rather than show thread is quite helpful as it highlights the text where it comes from and helps you dis-guard it if its not relevant to what you are looking for.

Pierce

Also Google is fairly forgiving about spelling errors, whether it be yours or those of people who have already posted.

I love the way that Google very patiently says "did you mean . . .?"

Thanks everyone, I'll see how it goes over the next few days