Searching on JWD is now a great tool

by Fatfreek 10 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Fatfreek

  Well, let me clarify that a bit.

  In a totally unscientific study of our relatively new search capability I've come to this conclusion: finding a post is dependent on when it was done. There is a delay of some 100 days, perhaps dependent on when some administrator does a scan of the entire database of posts -- which certainly must be time-consuming. As of this date, if you look for a posting made more recent than August 5, it probably won't make your hit list. Perhaps August 5 is the date a scan was performed, perhaps there's some other explanation.
  
  I found several threads with postings which straddled August 5, some were made earlier, some later. None appeared in the hit list more recent that August 5.
  
  That's some 3 1/2 months or 109 days ago.
  
  Perhaps that is when the last scan was done.
  
  This all means the pulldown list, "Posts made within" -- the selections of "The Last Week" or "The Last Month" are not working. Let me clarify -- they don't seem to work today. Perhaps immediately following a scan they may then work as they should.
  
  That said, do I like the new search? Absolutely! It's one of the best additions Simon has made to this forum. Think of the countless topics addressed here so many times over. Some of the best discussions have already been done by posters who've gone their own way. That's okay. A good search operation will probably find most of them to your heart's content.
  
  Boolean operators -- AND OR NOT -- work. These can also be great friends in searching.
  
  For example, "copies" produces an unwieldy list of 680 hits.
  
  copies AND color AND make AND some produces only three hits.
  
  Using NOT: search AND function within the title yields 27 hits. search AND function NOT "on jwd" filters that list down to 18 hits.
  
  Using prase searching (wrapping words with double-quote characters), however, the phrase "make some color copies" finds only one hit -- the posting made by Snakes on Aug 3.
  
  Case doesn't matter. Proper names do not need to be capitalized. Bridgman or bridgman finds two posts I made back in 2005.
  
  Len Miller
• 

  Fatfreek

  I forgot OR.

  Place the following in the search field, barb OR"barbara anderson" AND russell AND rutherford, and you should get some 18 hits.

  Search power is now limited by our imagination.

  Len
  
• 

  Fatfreek

  I forgot NOT.

  barb OR "barbara anderson" AND russell AND rutherford NOT farkel cuts your list down to 14.

  Len
• 

  justhuman

  nice points
• 

  Fatfreek

  nice points -- thanks, JustHuman.

  Now let's say you're wondering if today's Watchtower Society accepts forensic evidence such as DNA as a "second witness". You could call them but we all suspect where that would lead you. Instead, why not try to find all JWD discussions (threads), some six years worth of them, based on the following terms: "two witness", dna, evidence.
  
  If you place "two witness" dna evidence in the search field you would come up with some 44,039 hits to choose from. Kind of unwieldy isn't it?
  
  That's because, unlike many search engines on the internet, Google is one -- each term is not considered to be an addition to the others. On JWD, it's like stating: "two witness" OR dna OR evidence.
  
  What's the difference?
  
  "two witness" OR dna OR evidence yields 44,039 hits
  "two witness" dna evidence yields 44,039 hits -- evidence that JWD search expressions are actually terms that use hidden OR operators.
  
  However
  "two witness" AND dna AND evidence yields only 18 hits -- a far more manageable number of threads to sift through.
  
  Please Note: the operators AND, OR, NOT must be capitalized. If they are in lower case and, or, not they will be ignored.
  
  Len Miller
  
  
• 

  Fatfreek

  BTTT
• 

  Fatfreek

  BTTT
• 

  AudeSapere

  Thanks for the tips!

  Question: Are you typing out the word 'and' or are you using the ampersand sign (&) ?

  -Aude.
• 

  AlmostAtheist

  Aude - I tried "and" yesterday but it didn't work. After reading Fat's post, I tried "AND" -- that works! (The AND/OR/NOT is case-sensitive)

  So "this and that" will find threads with the words "this", "and" or "that" in them.

  But "this AND that" will only find threads with the words "this" and "that" both in them.

  Dave
• 

  drew sagan

  Now that i'm trying it out I really do like it! Makes it quite easy to find many of the hidden gems within the site.