Another search quirk

[Dennis_Knutson]

I apologize if this has been reported before, but after seeing another question about the error -1073807202 you get when VISA is not installed, I tried entering the code into the search box and hit the GO button. To my surprise, it returned no results. Went to the advanced search page and entered the code in the 'With all the words', and again no results. I got 155 results when entering the code into either the exact phrase or one or more fields.

[Laura F.]

Hi Dennis,

That is interesting behavior!  I don't see a record of us reporting this problem previously, so I will make sure to do so now.

Thanks for the feedback,
Laura

[TCPlomp]

I always thought that it was because of the minus that error codes were hard to find....

Ton

[Laura F.]

Hi Ton,

In the research that I did on this problem yesterday, it does seem to be that if you include the minus sign, you don't get any results, but if you omit the minus sign, you get results.  I'm not sure why.  I've reported the issue.

Thanks!
Laura

[tbd]

Hi Laura,

      I think this is expected behaviour.  The minus sign is interpreted as NOT in the search.  If you want to search posts that include the word "field" but not "field point" search for: field -"field point".  To search for a negative error number, put it in quotes like:

"-1073807202"

Cheers!

[Laura F.]

Hi tbd,

I think you are exactly right.  The minus sign (-) acts as an exclude operator in most search engines I've just learned. 

It is unfortunate for our community though because we have many error codes with minus signs and many users that don't know to put quotes around their error message when going through the search before posting steps!

Thanks for your help!
Laura

[Dennis_Knutson]

I didn't know about the special significance of the '-' either. Would it be possible to add a special search option for error codes? Or since the Exact Phrase search works, add a not that this should be used for error code searches?

[tbd]

For what it's worth, I'd like to see a Google-style:  "Did you mean "alternative search"" - but only if hyphen appears in a suspicious way - that is, outside quotes and not pre-pended to quoted-text.  I'll go for months without searching for an error number, and periodically forget this technique myself.

Cheers!

[Kallis]

Don't know what it takes to build a 'Google style' search suggested by tbd, but definetly that's will help us a lot and save searching time.

Message Edited by Kallis on 02-13-2007 05:11 AM

[Laura F.]

Hi Dennis,

It would be possible to have an error code search that was for our support site, but not built in to the forums since the forum search is controlled by Lithium. 

As for adding a note about searching for error codes, one place I see that we could add it would be in the Help link for the forum.  Do you think people would see it here? 

The other option may be to add it to the search screen you go through when posting a new message.  My concern about this is that the screen is already pretty busy and if I add to it, it may just discourage people from actually reading the text.

Thanks,
Laura