DSXchange

Someone wrote:Search!
This question has been answered in detail before.

I'd like to propose a new forum "rule". If someone posts a question and gets directed to the Search feature, and they then find a helpful post in their search, they should reply in their new thread with a link to what they found that helped them. That way, as the search results get increasingly polluted with "How do I do X": "USE THE SEARCH!" threads, someone searching for X will actually find a useful answer.

I've found that this is a real problem. I do a search for something, and the first 20 results that I look at are all people being told to use the search.

"If you follow me, you will not find what I found". Lets prove that wrong!

I've had the exact same problem. Searching for something I know is out there somewhere can get drowned out by posts that just say to search for it. I usually try to give examples of what to search for and/or post an example of what I found.

Perhaps some mechanism to exclude a thread from the search results would be helpful.

Well there IS a filter to search only for resolved topics.

If I asked a question and was told "Use the search", and I used the search and found an answer, I'd mark it as "resolved".

If You do that and post the link to the answer that solved Your question, then everybody else will be able to find the solution, too.

What a brilliant idea! Someone should suggest that in the Site/Forum... oh wait, that's exactly what this thread is about. Yes. People should do that. That's my suggestion.

You crack me up PhilHibbs.

Ok, here's a classic example. A colleague came to me for advice on a warning, "inserted sort does not fulfill the sort requirements of the downstream operator", so I searched here for that phrase and a variety of subsets of it, and in every single result, all I could see was "Use the forum search functon" answers. Absolutely no useful suggestions at all. Specifically, this post:

viewtopic.php?t=114516&highlight=insert ... m+operator

Search for that phrase, and there is exactly one result - that same post.

Is there another post that used to be returned by a search for that phrase, but no longer is?

Make sure you do an exact search and don't include too much text... there is a bug (feature?) in the other searches in that they only go back in time a small number of days, no clue why. The exact search searches everything. I got 57 matches on "does not fulfill the sort requirements", for whatever that is worth. Hmmm... sounds like that's what you did.

And yes, I feel your pain. I'm as guilty of making those posts as anyone and when I've actually tried to find a useful link for someone, there have been times when all I've found are the "you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" messages.