The new and improved Search Feature in Drumlines.org is very powerful. However, if you're not familiar with how to use it properly, it may not yield the results you are looking for.

To Perform a Search:

• Go to the Search Page
  
  
• Select the Category, Forum or Forums that you would like to search from the left.
  - Selecting a Category will search all forums in that category.
  - Selecting one forum will search in just that forum
  - Selecting multiple forums will search only withing those selected forums
  
  
• On the right, to search a keyword enter it into the box. You can click "Advanced Search Tips" for more help.
  - Entering a single keyword will search for that word.
  
  - Entering 2 or more words will search for each word, as if there were an OR operator. So entering peanut butter will search for posts containing peanut OR butter
  
  - Entering 2 or more words WITH PLUS SIGNS will search with an AND operator. So entering +peanut +butter will search for posts that contain peanut AND butter but they do NOT have to be together.
  
  - Entering 2 or more words IN QUOTE MARKS will search for the phrase. So entering "peanut butter" will search for posts that contain the PHRASE peanut butter and will not return the post if it contains only one of the words.
  
  - Entering 2 or more words with A MINUS sign will exclude words from the search. So entering +peanut -butter will search for posts which have the word peanut in them and DO NOT have the word butter.
  
  - You can mix and match search operators. For example, entering "peanut butter" -jelly would return posts containing the PHRASE peanut butter and NOT containing the word jelly.
  
  - Entering "peanut butter" +jelly -dance would return posts containing the PHRASE peanut butter and containing the word jelly but NOT containing the word dance.
  
  
• Below that, you can choose whether you are searching the subject AND body of the posts, or just the subject.
  
  
• Under the Username search section, you can enter a username here. This can be done with or without keywords. So entering "peanut butter" +jelly + dance in the keywords and the username of DLWebmaestro would return posts containing the PHRASE peanut butter AND the word jelly AND the word dance posted by the user DLWebmaestro.
  
  
• Next select a date range. There's an option to search all posts, or search for posts newer or older than a certain criteria. Narrowing down the search time will increase the speed of the results.
  
  
• Next you can choose how many results per page you wish to view.
  
  
• As well as choose to view a profile of the body. If selected this will show you the first few words in the body of each post.
  
  
• When you are finished, click "Submit".
  

I have again updated the search engine in order to utilize new technologies in MySQL 4.0.1. New features include ability to search by relevance, option to search parent posts only, option to show a preview of post body with results, and new operators. Here is a rundown of the current supported operators...

+
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every post returned.

-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any post returned.

(no operator)
By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the posts that contain it will be rated higher.

> <
These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a post. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.

( )
Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.

~
A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the post relevance to be negative. It's useful for marking noise words. A post that contains such a word will be rated lower than others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.

*
An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word.

"
A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (") characters matches only posts that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.




The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean full-text operators:

apple banana
Find posts that contain at least one of the two words.

+apple +juice
Find posts that contain both words.

+apple macintosh
Find posts that contain the word "apple", but rank rows higher if they also contain "macintosh".

+apple -macintosh
Find posts that contain the word "apple" but not "macintosh".

+apple +(>turnover <strudel)
Find posts that contain the words "apple" and "turnover", or "apple" and "strudel" (in any order), but rank "apple turnover" higher than "apple strudel".

apple*
Find posts that contain words such as "apple", "apples", "applesauce", or "applet".

"some words"
Find posts that contain the exact phrase "some words" (for example, posts that contain "some words of wisdom" but not "some noise words"). Note that the '"' characters that surround the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that surround the search string itself.