Re: [ARCHIVES] Unpredictable Periodic Announcement

On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Donald Hosford wrote:

> Tim Jones wrote:
> 
> > >The archives aren't searchable, alas, because of cgi policy here at
> > >the company.  But they are indexable by the large scale search
engines,
> > >and you can find things that way.
> >
> > I use this search key in Alta Vista http://www.altavista.com/
> > to find stuff by subject line
> >
> > +The +GZG +Digest +<subject terms>
> >
> > For example:
> 
> That is really COOL!	 :-)

it can be made cooler.

for a start, altavista ignores the "+the": "the" is a 'stopword', ie
it's
ignored because almost every page has it in. thus, you can leave that
out.

next, this will find other things, eg a page with "i tried to digest the
GZG sa'vasku rules, but i found them too complex". thus, rather than

+the +gzg +digest +<search term>

use

+"the gzg digest" +<search term>

which will look for just that string, with the words together in that
order. even better, use:

+url:http://people.canoe.ca/jhan/ft/Archive/ +<search term>

which will restrict the search to files in the ft archives on jerry's
site. note that this includes the old ftgzg-l archives, which to my mind
is a good thing.

i used to use this technique to search the internic's rfc archives until
i
found a proper rfc searcher.

well well well, whoever thought debugging and optimising altavista
queries
would be a field of expertise? it's already a crucial part of being a
professional web searcher, i suppose. it's only a matter of time before
there's a "for dummies" book on it.

tom