{"id":116,"date":"2006-08-25T14:26:13","date_gmt":"2006-08-25T14:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/25\/a-few-search-tips\/"},"modified":"2006-08-25T14:26:13","modified_gmt":"2006-08-25T14:26:13","slug":"a-few-search-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/25\/a-few-search-tips\/","title":{"rendered":"A Few Search Tips"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post<\/a> I said I would provide some tips on getting the best out of Google Groups<\/a> and finding what you’re looking for. But first off let’s start with a few general search tips. Google themselves provide some helpful guides on using the regular Google search engine:<\/p>\n

Basic Tips:
\nhttp:\/\/www.google.com\/help\/basics.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Advanced Search:
\nhttp:\/\/www.google.com\/help\/refinesearch.html<\/a><\/p>\n

These guides are well worth reading. There’s lots of stuff on the Advanced Search<\/a> page that are easy to overlook and can be very helpful in narrowing down your search. For example, you can limit your search to a particular domain. I often use this for searching for answers on Microsoft’s site. E.g.:<\/p>\n

“not allowed in this context” site:microsoft.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Note that the advanced search simply adds information to the regular search query. To search within a domain it simply adds the “site:” attribute to the search term. You can add this yourself in the regular search box. You can also exclude results from certain sites:<\/p>\n

“Macro Scheduler” -site:mjtnet.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Note the use of the quote marks to search for a specific phrase. In my first example above I wanted to find pages on microsoft.com that contained this error message. So I needed to use the quotes.<\/p>\n

Google Groups<\/a> searches Usenet messages. It works in much the same way as Google. But since Usenet consists of a huge array of groups spanning all manner of topics it is often necessary to narrow your search down to within certain groups. Consider this Google Groups search:<\/p>\n

create recordset<\/a><\/p>\n

The first page of results consists of messages from various groups covering VB, SQLServer, MS Access, Dreamweaver and Ultradev. What I really want to do is find out how to create a record set in VBScript. In much the same way the regular Google search lets you search within specific domains, you can search within specific groups:<\/p>\n

create recordset group:microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript<\/a><\/p>\n

This searches only within the microsoft.public.scripting.vbscript newsgroup. But there are other groups that discuss VBScript. And what if you don’t know what they are called? Well, you can use wildcards:<\/p>\n

create recordset group:*vbscript*<\/a><\/p>\n

This returns a much more targeted, useful set of results from various VBScript groups. Definitely my most used search construct.<\/p>\n

Hope this helps!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last post I said I would provide some tips on getting the best out of Google Groups and finding what you’re looking for. But first off let’s start with a few general search tips. Google themselves provide some helpful guides on using the regular Google search engine: Basic Tips: http:\/\/www.google.com\/help\/basics.html Advanced Search: http:\/\/www.google.com\/help\/refinesearch.html […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,11],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mjtnet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}