Reagan's Son

The New York Times ^ | January 26, 2003 | BILL KELLER

[TomServo]

I believe they are consecutive sequences of non-white-space characters.

Don't worry about your so-called "grumpiness". I've seen worse. I thought you were being quite nice about it.

I've found doing a search has been a trial-n-error sorta thing, but I think I've got it down. Not that it works all the time. For the most part, it seems to work very well, not that I've got a percentage down or anything like that.

And you're very welcome. :-)

[N. Theknow]

How the heck did this gem get past the NY Slimes editor?

Exactly!

Must be colder below ground than I thought.

[ThePythonicCow]

Dear Admin Moderator,

The search for titles that we're supposed to do, before posting, to avoid duplicate posts, is a little quirky. I tend to search on subparts of the entire title, in order to avoid missing something due to a slightly modified or multilated title, but this requires that I know more details to avoid missing matches for other reasons (such as not seeing Reagan's on a search for Reagan -- due to not realizing that the single-quote character was treated like an alphanumeric character, not a separator character.)

Even after some messing with it, I still was guessing wrong as to its behaviour, resulting in my posting dups. I think I've got it now, after a more systematic effort.

Question:

What's the best way to file suggestions for the FR webmeisters?

Suggestion:

On the search page http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/search, add a link to a more detailed (geeky) explanation, such as perhaps:

Search Details:

• A word is any sequence of four or more characters that are letters, numbers, underscores (_) or single quotes ('). All other characters are word separators (equivalent to spaces). Word matches are only done on whole words.
• Exact phrase matches are done in two steps:
  1. First matches are found for any titles containing any matching whole words of four or more characters.
  2. Then from those titles, any title having an exact fixed string match on the entire phrase, regardless of word boundaries, is selected.
  For example, the article "Reagan Responsible for dow 10k" can be found with the exact phrase search "Reagan Responsible for dow 1", and with "gan Responsible for dow 10k", but not with "esponsible for dow 10k".
• Searches are case insensitive. Upper case and lower case letters are treated as identical.

I'd keep this off the main search page, to avoid intimidating the normal folks.