# Searching



## maxiogee

I had occasion today to search for a thread's title in the English only forum.
That title was —> affect/effect
My search was exactly that. No quotation marks or other characters. 
The search reported 145 results - I was stunned. But, when I searched for the actual expression it was generally not there. What I got was either affect or effect.
Running a search for —> "affect/effect" produced only 4 results.

Is this what software publishers call a 'feature' or is it what users call a 'bug'? 

I would have thought that a search for a character string which had no spaces would return only results for the entire string. I can understand that it would be nice if using a space-delimited "/" —> affect / effect returned instances of either word, but I don't see the utility of doing so when the characters are all run together.


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## Nunty

I am hitching a ride on Tony's thread to ask another Search function question. Does it have an "exclusive or" operator? Thanks. (<Looking for the nerdy nun smiley...>


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## maxiogee

Nun-Translator said:


> I am hitching a ride on Tony's thread to ask another Search function question. Does it have an "exclusive or" operator? Thanks. (<Looking for the nerdy nun smiley...>


 
I think that's what I have 'discovered' - the use of a forward slash finds instances of what is before it and what is after it.
Searching for Bogart/Bacall will find every instance of Bogart and every instance of Bacall - and some of those would contain both words.

I don't think I quite grasp the concept of an "exclusive or". Are you looking for, to stick with the earlier example, instances of Bogart and instances of Bacall, but not instances of both?


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## maxiogee

I'm not sure what this proves, but I just experimented here with my bogart and bacall pairing

I tried looking for bogart bacall -"bogart + bacall" in this forum and got no result, which looks promising.
The trouble is in knowing what you're actually looking to find and to avoid. I can't think of any words I like to find instances of, but only whent hey are in isolation. Maybe since you asked the question you can try with whatever it was which prompted it.


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## Nunty

maxiogee said:


> I think that's what I have 'discovered' - the use of a forward slash finds instances of what is before it and what is after it.
> Searching for Bogart/Bacall will find every instance of Bogart and every instance of Bacall - and some of those would contain both words.
> 
> I don't think I quite grasp the concept of an "exclusive or". Are you looking for, to stick with the earlier example, instances of Bogart and instances of Bacall, but not instances of both?



Well, "exclusive or" is left over from my symbolic logic days. An "inclusive or" would find "Bogart" alone and "Hepburn" (I like her better than Bacall) alone and also both of them together. An "exclusive or" would find "Bogart" alone and "Hepburn" alone, but would not find the instances where they appear together on the page (not necessarily adjacent to one another).

Are we talking about the same thing?


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## maxiogee

Nun-Translator said:


> Well, "exclusive or" is left over from my symbolic logic days. An "inclusive or" would find "Bogart" alone and "Hepburn" (I like her better than Bacall) alone and also both of them together. An "exclusive or" would find "Bogart" alone and "Hepburn" alone, but would not find the instances where they appear together on the page (not necessarily adjacent to one another).
> 
> Are we talking about the same thing?


 
Indeed.

I'm thinking of the idea of searching for a word which frequently appears in an idiom, but you don't want to be returned any instances of the idiom. 
For example, you're looking for handle but you don't want flew off the handle.
I think the minus and quotation marks would get that. 
Search for handle -"flew off the handle" and you should get it, as far as I can see. 
The only problem is that we need to test it on real words and phrases as they appear in the forums here.


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## maxiogee

And it works.

I searched the C&S forum for handle and got 28 hits, including this one.
I then searched for handle -"flew off the handle" and only got 27. This thread wasn't reported.


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## mkellogg

Tony, a quick note: the search indexes consider any symbols such as / to be the same as a space.  The exception is a single apostrophe (which works great for can't, but awfully if your language abbreviates le or la as l'  )


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## maxiogee

Than/ks


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## cheshire

I didn't know that double-quotation-mark search is possible here as in Google.  I'm wondering if there are more useful search features that I don't know of.


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