BGonline.org Forums

Tip For Doing a SEARCH On This Web Site

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Sunday, 18 April 2010, at 7:37 p.m.

In Response To: Tip For Doing a SEARCH On This Web Site (Paul Weaver)

Here is a comparison between the built-in search function and Google's search function (site:bgonline.org).

1. Google for the most part offers more powerful functionality, such as Boolean expressions and tolerance of misspellings. It also has some heuristics for ranking searches in order of importance. It will also show you part of the text of the article in question instead of just the subject line.

2. When the bgonline archives were unavailable for a while, Google was still able to find some things because it had them cached.

3. Google does not have everything on this site indexed. It takes a while for its webcrawlers to catch up to the latest posts. Also, Google has certain indexing limits, so some posts or portions of posts may not be searchable by Google. The built-in search sees everything, including the latest posts.

4. The built-in search function allows you to limit the date range very accurately.

In general, if I know exactly what I am looking for (e.g, a post mentioning 61P-22 in the last three weeks), then I find that the built-in search is better. For more nebulous searches I think Google may work better.

Messages In This Thread

• Tip For Doing a SEARCH On This Web Site
  Paul Weaver -- Sunday, 18 April 2010, at 4:27 p.m.
  • Tip For Doing a SEARCH On This Web Site
    Timothy Chow -- Sunday, 18 April 2010, at 7:37 p.m.