Jasonwclark
May 6th, 2009, 11:40 AM
I've been playing around with this thing for a while now, but I'm still having trouble with it. It seems to default to an expansive search rather than a narrowing search, i.e. the more words you enter, the broader the search becomes. Rather than getting more specific with each additional term you enter, it instead goes more general (returning more results, rather than less.) In Google you can get around this by throwing the whole thing into quotations, which roughly translates to "search this exact phrase" or "search all these words together”, but I've tried doing this at CA and the usual result is no matches found.
I tested it, by searching for some obscure stuff that I knew existed, but the same thing happened, so now I'm thinking that it just treats quotation marks like any other character, rather than a indicator for the search field. I think this might be part of reason why you see so many people saying “I searched that, but nothing came up.” Or alternatively, because the search is expansive, you could end up with a ton of irrelevant results.
Has anyone else run into this issue, or know of any work arounds? Is it possible to adjust how it to a narrowing search, by tweaking with with settings or using a certain punctuation?
I tested it, by searching for some obscure stuff that I knew existed, but the same thing happened, so now I'm thinking that it just treats quotation marks like any other character, rather than a indicator for the search field. I think this might be part of reason why you see so many people saying “I searched that, but nothing came up.” Or alternatively, because the search is expansive, you could end up with a ton of irrelevant results.
Has anyone else run into this issue, or know of any work arounds? Is it possible to adjust how it to a narrowing search, by tweaking with with settings or using a certain punctuation?