Search Tips
Submitted by bfm on Thu, 2009-11-19 18:26
Tagged:
What to Search
There are two types of searching on this website. The Dilbert Strip Finder and the Web Site Content.
The search box on the side navigation bar every page will search the Dilbert Strip Finder.
If you want to search the web site content instead -- say for Pho Ottawa restaurants -- then select the "Search" button on the side navigation bar (with or without entering a search word), and then select the "Content" tab.
Here are some tips for the Dilber Strip Finder:
- Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT are not recognised. The search engine uses Natural Language mode.
- Not case sensitive.
- Wildcards (using the asterisk) are allowed except at the beginning of words. For exanple, meet* is allowed, but *ful will not work. (In this case, searching for *ful will instead search for ful)
- Search for individual dates using the formats YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY/MM/DD or YYYYMMDD. Wildcards are not available for dates.
- Most words are spelled with U.K. English instead of American English. Example: colour instead of color.
- Acronyms generally do not have periods. Examples: CEO, TV, PC, TBA, etc.
- Word stemming is automatically applied. This means that "meet" and "meeting" are considered to be the same word.
Results
- Search results are ranked by search engine relevance.
- Hover the mouse over the short book name to get the full book title. For example, hovering over "pumped" will show "Still Pumped from Using the Mouse."
Limitations
- Short words (3 characters or less) are not indexed.
- Words that occur in more than half the items are not indexed. The only word that this affects is "Dilbert," ironically enough.
More Information
The search engine is MySQL's full text search in natural language mode. The gory details are here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-natural-language.html
Comments
This is indeed great
I use it all the time to find topical strips in order to become more disliked at the office.
Some kind of tag function would be useful, i.e. categorization, but obviously would be a lot of work and I guess difficult to define.
(Like employee morale, new employee, management something something)
That's a great utility!
Thank you so much! After a lot of fruitless Google searches for a particular strip, I landed at this blog, and the "Strip Finder" located, first time, at the top of the list no less, the exact comic from the nineties that I was looking for!
Glad it Worked
Thanks and I'm really glad you were able to find the one you were searching for. It's easy when you can describe it fully.