need advice on searching The Wall, please

jv100

Rather than start a new thread, I though I'd see if there were old threads discussing the necessity of lining chimneys when venting new gas-fired steam boilers.  I've entered several variations of "steam gas chimney lining" into Search The Wall, but I just end up getting lots of recent posts that seem to have nothing to do with the subject I'm looking for.  Any advice on search techniques would be much appreciated!

Many thanks.

JV

Roland_18

Chimney lining

Here's one:

http://www.heatinghelp.com/forum-thread/77844/Lining-Chimney

Roland_18

Chimney lining

'nother one:

http://www.heatinghelp.com/forum-thread/130105/Who-has-the-best-residential-gas-steam-boiler

Roland_18

Searching

Oops!       I usually do a Google search and find lots of H.H. threads.

Bob Vennerbeck

same problem here

I'm usually pretty good at gaming search engines - but the one here at the Wall pretty much has me stumped as well - I always get a wodge of posts that don't appear to even contain the search string, never mind focused on what I need......



So I back out to Google, and more often than not, the same search finds me something on the Wall that is spot on...



I'm on a Mac running Safari, but that really shouldn't have any relevance here...



Clearly others have better luck - or phenomenal memories....



Vbob

jv100

Thanks, Roland...

...for the leads to those threads that mention chimney lining, as well as mentioning the Google search.  The way I initially found Heating Help was by doing a search about steam heating on Google; don't know why I didn't think to go back there. 

Thanks again!

JV

jv100

I'm glad to hear I'm not alone, Vbob!

I'm usually good at finding things on search engines too.  But the search functions on The Wall and the public library in the town I just moved to are both perplexing me, making me think I was losing my touch.  Now, if I could only use Google to search my local library's holdings...

Thanks for posting!

JV

DanHolohan

I have the techies looking at this.

We can do better. Thanks. 

crash2009

jv100

You can find a wealth of information by searching the wall.  When searching multiple words such as chimney liner, use quotation marks like this.



"chimney liner"



In the pulldown menu for Post Age click the down arrow and select ALL TIME.

In the Category section select ALL CATEGORIES.  Searching this way will give you hours of reading material.  You might notice that you may want to narrow things down a bit.  Do the search over again and choose, for example, Gas Heating.  You will get less hits, but all the threads that mention "chimney liner" in the Gas Heating Section will be listed.

If you know who wrote the thread you can type their handle in the Author section.  For example to see only what Dan Holohan has written on the subject, put his handle in the author section.

In the Display section select 100 items per page.



Here is a shortcut to the search I was just writing about.

http://www.heatinghelp.com/forum/results/1



 

jv100

I'm not complaining, Dan!

This forum is fantastic!  If a lot of people are struggling with the search function, it might be worth looking at.  But if just a few of us haven't quite figured it out yet, then it's up to us to learn!

Thanks for all you do.

JV

jv100

Thanks for the pointers, crash2009!

I've used the quotation approach for searchs at other websites, and I thought I had used it for my chimney liner search, but maybe I had forgotten to do so.  I know I didn't try the Categories option; that definitely would have helped.

Thanks again.

JV

Albany Chris

Using Google

For those of you using Google search, you can add the search term heatinghelp.com to the criteria. THen the first choices will be from here, and there will probably be a plus (+) option to see more results from this site.

Dan, a lot of sites are using google search within their site, but I think you get their ads then...

jv100

Thanks for the tip, Albany Chris!

That will definitely streamline the search process.



JV

DanHolohan

Yes, and there's another option though them.

We pay them so our members can use it. The techies are working on that right now. Thanks. 

DanHolohan

Upgrade is now live.

There's a new Google-based search engine on the Wall and a second on the rest of the site. I hope you like it.



Thanks for the suggestion!