Finding Information on an Online Forum

It is said that 'seek and thou shall find'. How true! When was the last time

you thought you could have been at an advantage had you known some piece of

information, but did not know where and how to look for it, at which source,

when, whom to ask and what to search? Every netizen must have heard about

'search engine optimization', but here we will discuss 'search results

optimization.' Consider a community phenomenon that has sprawled up over the

Web, slowly but surely. We are here talking of the PHP bulletin boards, like

PCQuest forums.

Understanding behavior



When searching through a PHP bulletin board, usually you get a page which
displays the options for an advanced search. The first field should contain the

search keywords, which should necessarily be very carefully selected, else

searching for 'I.T.' as in information technology will lead you to some page

describing income tax instead. For instance, try searching for the word K.D.E.

out there in one such forum. The results which you will most probably get will

be those in which either of the letters K,D or E can be found as

single-character words. So either you should have selected the keywords as K.

AND D. AND E. while searching (it accepts the OR and NOT filters as well) or you

should have searched straightaway for KDE, without anything between any two of

the letters. This is one such behavior exhibited by the PHP bulletin boards'

search engine.

The ANY filter at work on Sourceforge.net when you search for the keywords 'mp3 plugin'

Try the same on, say, a full-fledged Web search engine and

you will actually get results containing the characters K.D.E. as you typed them

and not just any one of the three letters. Let us take a few open-source

directories as well. Go to Sourceforge.net and enter the search keywords there

as, say, 'mp3 plugin.' The result which you get will, by default, include

MP3 software which are too heavy to be called as a plugin, as well as plugins

which do not deal with MP3 files, in addition to actual MP3 plugins. The

following screenshot depicts this. So this search uses the 'ANY' filter.

Now consider Freshmeat.net, a sister website of the

previous one. On entering the same search keywords, you will discover that the

'AND' filter has been used by default which will give only the results

containing both the two words you entered.

And both of these websites are said to use Yahoo search

only.

The default behavior of search engines can be that

different. Another degree of complexity can be added if you use Web search

engines. Their advanced search options will usually help you cut the coat

according to the cloth, though.

More precision



If the forum you are searching on is one in which you regularly participate,

it saves a lot of time if you remember who posted the information. You need not

remember the complete username. You can use the * wild card as well. For

instance, try to search the forums.pcquest.com for the solution to the printing

problem faced in PCQLinux 2005 when you do not precisely remember where the post

lies and what keywords you should use. Also you do not know how old the post is.

But all you remember is that a poster with the username beginning with the word

'satej' posted it. What do you do? Enter satej* in the 'Search for

Author' field.

Searching beyond the search engine Those pressed for time may be using search engines. But not using them may turn out to be more useful in some cases, especially if relevance matters more than speed. There are several Web directories which you can consider to be a database of 100% relevant search results defined under a specific hierarchy of inter-related topics. Browsing through them does take time, but is bound to give you precisely what you are looking for in lesser time. Of course, you can search most of such directories as well, but it is not recommended. Then there are the news sections which you can browse through fairly quickly on your own to get more information on any event. If you use a news search engine though, chances are the index may not have been updated to include the latest and you will fail to get the complete story. If you used a search engine instead of a Web directory, you won't easily get these links

In the screenshot on the next page, the same symbol * was

used in the 'Search for Keywords' field so as to get the results as all the

posts ever made in the 'All about PCQLinux 2004' thread.

You can further narrow down the results by specifying which

section and/or which category should be searched. Of course, this assumes that

the information contained in those sections/categories actually deals with what

the name of the section/category is. Else you may miss some precious

information, which was accidentally put in the wrong place. As an example, in

forums.pcquest. com, you may logically think that discussions regarding PCQLinux

2006 must lie in the PCQLinux 2006 channel only. But it is not always the

case...plenty of discussions have happened in two threads in the PCQLinux 2005

channel as well.

If you are looking for a specific post, you should select

the result display to be in the form of posts. If you are only browsing for

threads discussing a topic of interest/opinion, it is wiser to set the result

display to be in the form of topics.

Suppose that you are searching for the

opinion/feedback/comments of the readers regarding a specific month's issue at

the PCQuest forums. Here it makes sense to set the search result to be displayed

in the form of posts and not just topics, else you will most probably get only

one result-a thread which is created specifically for that issue.

It also helps to remember when that information was

released which, in most cases, is not the same time as you read it. So you can

further zero in on the relevant results by specifying the time interval during

which the information might have been posted, as well as whether the search

keywords should be present only in the actual body of the post, or even in the

message subjects/titles.

As examples, let us consider the announcement of the

'Living Digital' gaming contest on forums.pcquest.com. If you search for

that, you should see that you search for posts made during atleast the previous

six months and not for any shorter time interval. Several posts regarding

various problems faced in PCQLinux 2005 have the subject as  '(Technical)

Support request' or 'Bug



report'.

So searching with these keywords not just in the body but

also in the message subject/title as well may be able to get you to the solution

you need faster than going to results where that software is only being

discussed about, with no technical questions at all.

Here you see the entire PCQLinux 2004 channel of the PCQuest forums in the chronological order

The extra edge



Sorting search results helps save you lots of time. You can sort the results

given by the PHP bulletin board's search engine by various useful parameters,

such as the time the post was made, the subject of the post, the title of the

thread in which that post lies, the author as well as the forum in which the

post lies. Each parameter can be being sorted in the ascending/descending order.

So, as an example, if you want to locate a very old post,it helps to sort the

results by the post time, in the ascending order. The screenshot given is the

result of searching the 'All about PCQLinux 2004' channel of the PCQuest

bulletin boards so that only the subjects of all the posts ever made in that

channel are displayed, sorted by post time, in the ascending order.

Something which can be irritating to many a user would be

the amount of scrolling you need to do in the page, which again, wastes time. If

all you want to do is to quickly get to a post hidden deep inside whose

subject/author are known to you, you can set the number of characters displayed

per post to be zero. For most searches, though, the default introduction-like

style of 200 characters per post will suffice. If you do not want to waste much

time following links as well as if you have enough bandwidth, set the option to

'All available'.

Your own capacity



If you want to search for something in the bulletin boards, you must be

reasonably sure that you had actually read it at some time. Memory is the key.It

is not worth it to try search with the keywords '



India



victory' if you cannot precisely



remember whether



India



did really win.

A sense of belonging to the group also matters. As

long as you regularly take part in discussions, you will get a fair idea of the

personal characteristics and traits of someone's posts. Using precisely the

keywords that one frequently uses in his/her posts, you can virtually eliminate

the need to filter the search results by username. As an example, when you

commute by train or bus to and from work and home, within a week you get to know

what are the 'strengths and weaknesses' of those who are competing for that

extra inch of space.

An eye for detail is an enormous advantage. Imagine

this-you go to a shop and ask the shopkeeper for, say, a camera that you once

saw in the shop's showcase. And now you want to buy it. The shopkeeper claims to

stock atleast a hundred different models, which he will obviously not show to

you one-by-one. You then feel that you should have looked at the camera more

carefully when you saw it first. Atleast whether it was a Web camera or a

digital one. The same situation applies to searching online. If you want to make

your way through irrelevant results, include as descriptive keywords as

possible.

To conclude, while the Internet is a titanic resource of

information, you need to know how to get that information. After heaving read

all this, aren't you thinking of searching for that long lost post!

Hiren Mehta