searching the wall

Brian_74

Last night I discovered that one of my radiators is leaking at the bottom. I wanted to search the wall and see what's been posted in the past. I tried the built in search function, but couldn't get any useful results. I tried the site restricted Google link JFP kindly provided, but had the opposite problem. Search for just "radiator" in Strictly Steam yielded 25 results. I know there are more than that. And when I clicked on the results link, I never got taken to the proper results. What am I do wrong?



I'm certainly open to tips/suggestions about the radiator, but I figured if I could get the searching down, it would be like teaching me to fish instead of giving me one. Or something like that.

jpf321

yep .. i see your problem ..

I tried to utilize the google search links in an effort to make wall searching easier since I too have had a hard time searching the wall for things .. even things that I have written .. unfortunately, the google doesn't seem to index all of the wall and it's unclear what parts of the wall they do index .. or if they are simply slow to index parts ...



I just did a few wall searches on "leaking radiator" the results WITHOUT QUOTES is overwhelming since the developers have decided it best to search of any occurance of all words .. so you get posts with just radiator, or with just leaking, and a few with leaking radiator but not contiguous, if you ADD QUOTES .. then you get only 3 results .. i have also tried some standard SQL syntax using % (for wildcard of any length) and ? for wildcard of a single char .. and that didn't help much.



so your frustration is heard .. not only is wall searching somewhat difficult .. it helps if you know the author or the particular forum .. but when researching in general such as  leaking radiator you are going to have a problem .. in addition, people often abbreviate and misspell (leeking, rad, radiater, etc) and those will not come up.



perhaps another search engine besides google has a broader index of HH.com .. i'll see what bing or Y! has to offer.

jpf321

maybe DAN could ...

Submit the site AND the RSS feed to Y! here: [url=https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit]https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit



Or he could add the RSS feed to these 45 sites for free: [url=http://www.jasonbartholme.com/45-working-sites-to-quickly-submit-your-rss-feeds/]http://www.jasonbartholme.com/45-working-sites-to-quickly-submit-your-rss-feeds/



And I recommend that anyone with a Google account add the RSS feed to their home page .. this will show google that it is an interesting feed for people and Google will be more apt to index the feed and the site... to do this:

1) go to your personal home page: http://www.google.com/ig

2) Click "Add stuff" on upper right (above map)

3) Scroll and click "Add Feed or Gadget" on left side

4) Paste the following as the feed: [url=http://www.heatinghelp.com/forum/rss]http://www.heatinghelp.com/forum/rss

5) Click "Add" ..



And it would be helpful if the RSS feed had a bit more structure, that way we could search our own feeds .. but he never replied to that suggestion I made on his suggestion forum.

Brian_74

JPF, you inspired me

JPF, your Google homepage comment made me remember that since I subscribe to the Wall via the Google Reader, I could use that search window. I got 27 hits for "radiator leak -vent" (without the quotes). The downside is that I can search only what's been posted since I added the Wall to G-reader. Still not the steamy goodness I had hoped for, but it's a start.

jpf321

fixed .. thx

fixed thx

jpf321

just added to Google Reader....

if you change the view to "list" .. and keep your fingure on Page Down key .. it will load in older content .. presumably Dan's site maintains an RSS record without expiration so theoretically, you can download as much RSS content as exists.



ACTUALLY NEVERMIND THE ABOVE ... however it does seem that search goes back longer than you have been a subscriber anyhow .. i just did a search and it found posts from early Dec .. and I only just added it to GR today. maybe it's as long as anyone had been using GR .. the stats say there are 10 of us