Using Google to search the forums instead of the actual forum search bar

Not as much of a suggested improvement, but more of a “hack” or “trick”

So, I find that the in-house search bar is kind of difficult to use effectively [at times, not all the time].

For instance, if you filter your search through “most relevant”, it most often pulls up posts and topics from circa '12 [whyyyy would those be most relevant?]

If you filter the search for “latest topic or post”, the spectrum of choices gets super broad and basically pulls up just about everything except what I’m looking for.

I usually have much better results putting my key search word or phrase + yoyoexpert forum into Google’s search bar. What I’m searching for is usually within the first two or three links.

So yeah.

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Nice tip! I’ve had trouble with the search feature as well.

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Can you provide some examples of where you had difficulty? Type the letter “l” to scope your search to latest. Like this:

Origami l

Versus

Origami

Also, if you are trying to match topic titles (versus “finding a post someone made”), it is smart to be specific about that, if that’s what you’re looking for.

Origami in:title

or if you want anything in the first post or title

Origami in:first

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Is there a place that has a list of all the tricks you can use in searches?

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Just visit Search results for '' - YoYoExpert and click / tap on the right hand panel, it’s all there.

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I am searching for a particular yo-yo that might be for sale or trade

Scope your search to the Buy / Sell / Trade category and use the “order by latest post” search option, like so:

breeze #buy-sell-trade l

Alternately you can specify just the open topics if you don’t care about closed topics (old sales)

breeze #buy-sell-trade status:open

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I am searching for a picture of a yo-yo

Ah, unfortunately this is hard mode, because unless the user who added the image either …

  • used a filename that has the name of the yo-yo in it, that is art-grail.jpg versus IMAGE.JPG

  • after uploading the image, edited the image tag so that it includes the description, e.g.

    ![DESCRIPTION GOES HERE|690x264](upload://{filename}.jpg)

  • added text to the post that has the name of the yo-yo in it, that is “hey yo-yo doodz here’s a pic of my a-rt grail {pic}” versus “{pic}”

… then you are honestly, kinda super mega boned? Outside of sci-fi like “our supercomputers have the ability to magically analyze all images and tell that it is a picture of exactly this yo-yo” this is wayyyy beyond hard mode. Like way way wayyy beyond hard. So far beyond.

Now that being said, you can scope searches to posts with images in them.

breeze with:images

However, as I previously indicated, unless the word “breeze” appears in the image filename, the image description, or the post… you’re kinda at the mercy of the person who made the post. And it is entirely possible they used the word “breeze” and then posted some totally unrelated animated GIF instead, who knows…

You can try the above search to see what I mean.

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with:images is cool.

Now what if I have some sense or feeling that I can’t quite put into words. How do I search for that?

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giphy

1 Like