how to group terms in a search

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whoof
Posts: 2519
Joined: 29 Apr 2014, 2:13pm

how to group terms in a search

Post by whoof »

For instance if I knew that was a post about someone touring Italy on a Pennyfarthing with a dog and I put, Italy Pennyfarthing dog into the search in the touring forum I get individual results. That is, posts such as 'A dog bit me when touring in India', 'The gearing on my Pennyfarthing is too low', 'the coffee in Italy isn't all it's cracked up to be'. Is there a way of getting a search returned that includes all three terms?
old_windbag
Posts: 1869
Joined: 19 Feb 2015, 3:55pm

Re: how to group terms in a search

Post by old_windbag »

This may or may not help you. If you put + between all words it'll find posts with all items containing all those words I believe. But to put "'s around I think looks for that exact phrase.... or it appears to when I've done it.
whoof
Posts: 2519
Joined: 29 Apr 2014, 2:13pm

Re: how to group terms in a search

Post by whoof »

old_windbag wrote:This may or may not help you. If you put + between all words it'll find posts with all items containing all those words I believe. But to put "'s around I think looks for that exact phrase.... or it appears to when I've done it.



Thanks, it seems to work for the " " . Putting + with say Touring and Under it wasn't until the 14th topic before it returned a search with both terms
tim-b
Posts: 2091
Joined: 10 Oct 2009, 8:20am

Re: how to group terms in a search

Post by tim-b »

Hi

I think that the CUK search adds the + by default to individual words, so the " " tend to be more useful
Searching is very complex, and to use your tongue-in-cheek example "penny farthing" (303 matches) will get different results to "pennyfarthing" (84 matches) using CUK

It doesn't help your query but you can harness the power of google on this forum to pull out the individual topics (as opposed to every reply to a topic as above)...head for Google and put penny farthing site:http://forum.cyclinguk.org into their search box. I got 24 topics (penny farthing / pennyfarthing doesn't seem to matter). Adding " " splits the search down to the one instance of pennyfarthing and 23 penny farthings

Oh, and if you add Italy you get a topic that includes an Italian POW and a penny farthing (7th reply) but no dog :)

The advanced search on CUK gives you plenty of different options too

Regards
tim-b
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