I’m considering purchasing a DA42. I’d like to have a look at what DA42 flyers post. Is there a way to get the usernames of DA42 flyers through the search tool?
I might also be interesting to undertake search based on where forum members are based.
And finally can one sort the search results by date?
Piotr_Szut wrote:
Is there a way to get the usernames of DA42 flyers through the search tool?
Not exactly. You can search for users that have mentioned DA42. You can modify your search with things similar to the better search engines, e.g. “Diamond DA42” will search for that exact phrase whereas without the quotes it will search for Diamond or DA42, though it will put results with both matching nearer the top. You can insist certains words are included like this:
buying +DA42Which would match anything with the word DA42 in it, but favour posts with “buying” in them as well.
You can do wildcards, for example:
DA4*will match DA42, DA40, DA42Tdi or whatever.
You can do proximity searches, like this:
“DA42 diamond”~5Which means find the word DA42 and Diamond no more than 5 words apart (in any order), so it would find “Diamond makes the DA42” as well as “Diamond DA42”
Boosted searches allow you to adjust the relevance of each word:
diamond^10 DA42Would make Diamond far more important than DA42, so anything with Diamond will come nearer the top, with DA42 lower down.
There is no built-in search mechanism for searching what people put in their profiles, but Google will get you pretty close:
Ditto for where members are based.
And no, you can’t sort results by date; search results are sorted by relevance.
There is also this description of the EuroGA search function which on a quick test appears to be current.
I have updated the Posting Tips page.
What determines the order of hits when you make a search in the forum? It looks random.
Frequently I’m searching for a rather recent posting so I’d like the hits to be sorted by time/date. Is that possible?
Relevance. You cannot currently order by date, though if you’re feeling adventurous you can filter by date.
I have to say I find the search function almost unusable give the lack of chronological ordering. Perhaps the relevance algorithm needs some tweaking?
What I find is helpful is to use the AND operator (has to be uppercase AND).
Also if you have some idea of who wrote the thing you are looking for, clicking on the search button
with an empty expression in the box brings up the second search option
There are many other options – see David’s link above.
David wrote:
Relevance. You cannot currently order by date, though if you’re feeling adventurous you can filter by date.
Thanks, that would help.
Btw: How is “relevance” defined in this context?
Suggestion for the future. It would be nice to be able to sort the results by date. Often I know I’m looking for a post in the past few months, but I’ve to look through ones that are years old.
