Search Limitation

[Neil Croft]

Why can't I search for "WaitForMultipleObjects"? Word too long?

[Mel Bishop]

I copied-n-pasted your search term and didn't have any problems (other than not finding anything).

What system/browser are you using?

xp with Slimbrowser here.

[Don Ewald]

Using POFFS I was able to find many instances of WaitForMultipleObjects. I'm not sure why the PB forum software doesn't return any results.

[Neil Croft]

I copied-n-pasted your search term and didn't have any problems (other than not finding anything).

What system/browser are you using?

xp with Slimbrowser here.

XP and Firefox. The point being, that particular query, as noted by Don, should produce multiple results.

[Rodney Hicks]

Search with "WaitForMultiple*" works when "WaitForMultipleObjects" doesn't.

[Don Ewald]

Thanks for the post Rodney. I've never used wildcards in the search box here and that's pretty darn handy.

[Chris Holbrook]

Similar problems searching for GDIplus function calls by name - using wildcards is not always the answer, because some of them differ only in the last character.

What I do to get around it is to use a Google or Yahoo search including the word "Powerbasic".

I would guess that a lot of people will just give up when the search returns no answers.

Either the maximum length of a search term should be clearly shown or, better - much better - it should be increased.

[Gary Beene]

Hi Neil,
For long terms, put spaces and quotes around it like this:

" WaitForMultipleObjects "

Someone posted this tip a while back - works for me.

[Knuth Konrad]

What I do to get around it is to use a Google or Yahoo search including the word "Powerbasic".

Google has an even better way to refine your search. The parameter site:<domain name> restricts the search to that specific domain, i.e.

"WaitForMultipleObjects siteowerbasic.com"

I find that very convenient, since I often remember that I read something about a topic and where, but don't know under which section of the web site it was located.

[Gary Beene]

And, Knuth,
As I understand it, to search PowerBASIC.com for "unicode", I would type in to Google this line:

siteowerbasic.com unicode

Darn! a : followed by a p gets turned into a . How did you do that, Knuth?

Any other tidbits to know about a site search? I've only used it a few times.

Do you have the general perception that the Google site search is better/worse than the search built into the forums?

[Knuth Konrad]

And, Knuth,
Darn! a : followed by a p gets turned into a . How did you do that, Knuth?

If you use the "Reply" button (not the "Quick Reply"), there's an option to disable smilies (see attached screenshot)

Any other tidbits to know about a site search? I've only used it a few times.

None that I'm aware of.

Do you have the general perception that the Google site search is better/worse than the search built into the forums?

Google is naturally lacking behind in content, as it crawls the site only ever so often, so very new postings might not show up in Google yet. But searching is Google's core competence so they of course trump every search algorithm the forum coders (or underlying database engine coders) come up with.

In general (with forums) I start off using the built-in search tool due to the above restriction. Only if that returns no hits, but I'm certain that it's there, I resort to Google. It differs for more content-centric sites (as opposed to peer-to-peer sites like forums) like Reddit or Slashdot. There I typically start my search in Google.

[Eric Pearson]

I use the Google Advanced Search Page for everything. It makes it very easy to search a single site like powerbasic.com, and it has several other major goodies. You can do all of the same things with the regular Google Search "command line", but this is so much easier.

When I use it to search the forums I often see posts that are less than a week old. I just Googled "Mattias" on powerbasic.com and restricted it to pages updated in the last month -- I figured I had at least a 50-50 chance of finding any -- and the first hit is a post from 16 hours ago.

-- Eric

[George Bleck]

Google is EXTREMELY fast in indexing... perhaps it was dumb luck but I have seen something I posted an hour earlier already in the index.

Going to test something... Keyword: Oceanus

That keyword has never been mentioned on the PowerBASIC forums to date... let me see how fast it takes google to index it.

I will keep doing a search for oceanus siteowerbasic.com until it pops up and then I will report back.

[Kurt Kuzba]

Google has an even better way to refine your search. The parameter site:<domain name> restricts the search to that specific domain, i.e.

"WaitForMultipleObjects siteowerbasic.com"

This will work in most search engines, including Bing and Yahoo as well.
Google may have been the first to implement it, but it is now pretty much standard.