August 22, 2019 at 12:54 pm
Does SQLServerCentral have any advanced search features, or can anyone share any tips? Does everyone just use google with site:sqlservercentral.com?
August 22, 2019 at 2:34 pm
We do have a site search, which does limit to this domain for google. You can also limit by content type.
Is there something you were looking for?
August 22, 2019 at 5:08 pm
Hi Steve. This site is such an incredible resource, I'm just trying to use it as productively as I can. 🙂
I was looking for more advanced searches, like complete phrases, boolean connectors, excluded words, or for content posted within a date range. For forum search, it would also be nice to be able to restrict searches to current (or a specific) forum only.
For example, I was looking for posts about Docker. Through a basic search, I found that Andrew Pruski posts a bit about it. But he posts about a lot of other things, too, so browsing his blog doesn't help. So now I'd like to search for all articles only by him (or posted in his blog) related to Docker. A simple keyword search only narrows things down so much.
August 22, 2019 at 5:40 pm
Hmmm, keyword searches are definitely hard, and I wish we had something more layered. There are tags for sure that can help, but organizing to get all of xxx is hard if it's not tagged.
August 22, 2019 at 8:50 pm
Sure, I get it. I mean, what are we -- a bunch of experts at organizing information, or something? 😉
(I keeeed, I keeeed!)
If anything, this is one community where people truly understand how hard it is. Tags can help, but there's still a lot of untagged content. Is there a search syntax for tags, distinct from searching body text, like at SO? Even if there is, you still have to know the magic incantation. How many times have I searched SO for tag [SSAS], only to find the content I'm looking for is under [SQL-Server], or similar?
There's no easy answer, but thanks for the thoughtful responses. Maybe sometime you could engage the community in an open tagging exercise. Crowdsource the dirty work, I say.
August 22, 2019 at 10:05 pm
crowdsourcing is on the list. We allow tags (now) in the forums, which helps. Content needs more tags, though we had issues allowing random tags on the old site. Need to limit the list and let people choose. That will help cut down the results from Google.
The Google search is the best. Haven't tried/tuned elasticsearch, but we tried FTS and it's poor. Certainly not easy to search within search results.
The hard part is trying to come up with a pattern that works for lots of random things. I want author x or topic y and then want to limit to some sort of topic.
Please feel free to report missing tags for articles. For posts, not quite sure. Also, we don't always get tags with blogs, so that's another issue.
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