Forum Searching

Please feel free to add to this page any tips on searching the forum

While a basic search would involve simply typing the appropriate words in the search box, searching the different Forums individually is always an option.

Each MAJOR topic on the Index page is considered to be a forum

Just click on the Forum heading and that forum's top page will offer a "search this forum" on the left side by the Forum name.

Also, drilling down to any of the topics in that forum will also offer a "search this topic"

For multi word searches, put the string within "quotes like this". That exact group will be all that comes up.

If you are looking for a small word, anything less than 3 letters will need an asterisk* to actually search anything.

If you want to search multiple, similar terms and get hits on ANY of them, you can put them between parentheses (separated,by,commas)

OR separated|by|the pipe character and posts with any of the terms will be shown.

If you do a broad search and find a lot of results that share a term you don't want included, include that term in the search with a - (negative sign) in front (-term).

So, if you want to read about Piper Exhausts, you could search on "piper exhaust". Searching +piper and +exhaust will get you every post with piper and every post with exhaust. To find all exhaust posts WITHOUT piper, search exhaust -piper

Even after creating a very broad search, the search box at the top left will let you re-search within THOSE results.

These are very general rules and I am sure there are more available.

You can also click on ADVANCED Search and use the form there to pick all of your search options.

That is also how you search for posts by a member. Use the Search for author: search box.

Taken from a post by John Callaghan (BritCarNut)

== As an adendum to the above, there are so many different 'commands' that can be used to "simplify" searches of many databases (including Google) which rely on what is known as the "Boolean Operators" - most of the more common (and therefore, useful) ones can be found here ==