just use the site: qualifier to limit results to freerepublic.com
and the intitle: qualifier to limit the search to titles.
so the flu search is:
site:freerepublic.com intitle:flu
Posted on 07/20/2022 5:42:08 AM PDT by logi_cal869
I was looking for an article, typed in (without quotes) 'flu' under 'titles' and got "Nothing matched your criteria."
I then type in under 'keyword' and get innumerous articles with 'flu' in the title.
IOW, search failed. Bigly.
I'm not asking tongue-in-cheek: I genuinely want to understand this obvious glitch. In this case, I found what I wanted. But I'm of the opinion that many have had the same experience and also have the same question.
Yes, I'm logged in - /s - and I even tried a different browser as a public user. Same results.
Pinging Admin: Please see OP.
because it was three letters
experiment with current titles and you will see what I mean
What I do, is close the window or browser tab, relaunch FR, THEN search. That usually fixes the problem.
Yes, I know this isn't a root cause assessment. But it gets you from A to B.
Only article titles can be searched and words with three or fewer letters are not searched at all.
I have looked for specific keywords that would lead to a past posting and got the same message.
Was the asterisk ‘*’ part of your query? If so, try removing. I received several articles with “flu” in the title.
Yep. It has to be more than 3 letters.
I should not be to hard to get a search engine like Apache’s Lucene to index all of Free Republic and then build a simple user interface to make searching easy and efficient.
Mod: “Search still works ... sometimes.”
OMG: My screen resolution prescribes scrolling and I’ve NEVER scrolled ALL the way down on the failed search screen until just now.
I’m sure THAT’S IT!
Knowing that now will guide my keywords in future postings and should be advisable to others.
(IMHO that line should be at the top)
Title searches must be no less than 4 letters. Keyword searches can be less.
Search needs a minimum number of word letters to work.
I think I recall it being a seven letter minimum.
I always use two or three words at once, so that has not been an issue for me for a long time.
I just use a regular search engine and put free republic after it. Works a lot better than search on this site
I’ve never tried more than one word. Great advice.
For some reason, there IS a 3-letter minimum for search terms (see comments); I didn’t know that prior and is applicable to the OP subject.
I’ve tried that, too, with mixed results. In fact, I just tried it for ‘flu’ and would never have found the article I was looking for with that method.
This shortcoming mandates good use of keywords. The comments - and consequent revelation - were very helpful to me in that respect.
All search engines don’t do three letter words because it would overload the system.
Ironically, that’s news to me (I’m a geek). If that’s true, it’s a little embarrassing. But then again, I’ve never coded for a search engine.
just use the site: qualifier to limit results to freerepublic.com
and the intitle: qualifier to limit the search to titles.
so the flu search is:
site:freerepublic.com intitle:flu
Search only works for the Title Nazis.
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