

| Subject: | Don't clip your replies!-- now how to search the archives |
| From: | Stuart MacMillan |
| Date: | Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:33:24 -0800 |
David has it right, of course. If you have trouble getting good search results, here is what works well for me: I start by leaving either the keyword or subject blank, and I usually add "authors" like "Haynes," "Daryl," "Beierl," "Wilford," "BenT" "Alistair" and other established contributors to the search criteria. Then I'll reverse the keyword or subject blank entry and run it again. All my electrical issue searches include the author "Beierl," for obvious reasons! This limits the results, increases the quality, and these folks usually include the original post like David suggests. For example, I just ran a search for the subject "thermostat" from 2010 and left the end date blank. I got 140 hits. Ran it again with "Haynes" as author, and I got 11. Making "thermostat" the keyword with the subject blank resulted in 71 posts from Dennis, and I can quickly glean all of the expertise on thermostats he has contributed in the past three years (stick with dealer or Wahler as he reiterated recently). This whole exercise took about 5 minutes, and no search took more than a second or so. Archive searches work extremely well when you refine your criteria this way and searches seem to be much, much faster now than they used to be anyway. I depend on them! BTW, "netiquette" only appears 7 times since 2010. Stuart
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