searching

beardedsalmon

i know this has been raised before but i just had to vent a moments frustration. :mad:

i search before i post any comp i find and scroll through all the results.

i normally do two searches, one with the URL and one with win and two keywords, often the company name and the prize i.e Win 2013 gatwick.

i often find my posts are dupes and the comps were posted weeks ago.

it's so frustrating!!! i don't tally post count/thanks etc etc - but i do love giving something back and the odd pm or IWIWIW post that means i helped make someone else's day.

i know the search is not built specifically for our part of the site and im sure anything that could have been done has been done already but GRRRRRR!!!! :rotfl:

ok rant over - back to comping!


xx

Blulu

Suggestion: perhaps when searching with your keywords, don't include 'win'. Not everyone uses this word when posting comps. If they don't use that word, your search won't find their comps.

Thanks for what you add to the site regardless :T:T

Marg2k8

I am not sure if the search is case sensitive, so I would always search on say gatwick and Gatwick

toniq

A fab way to search is to chop the url down so for instance www.femalefirst.co.uk will be searched as femalefirst,that search generally is good.

x

One-Eye

I understand your frustration.

The URL is often the best search term but can fail when the comp can be accessed from various webpages or the form is on a different page to the comp description. The previous poster may have linked to only one of the pages and you may search for the other one.

For this reason I always search for the domain either from the URL or the email address if the answer requires an email. If possible I try and also use the AND operator, especially when searching for a company that does a lot of competitions eg. nowmagazine AND samsung

Even this will not work for cases like bauer radio comps where the comp can appear on many websites. If I wanted to post https://www.hallamfm.co.uk/s157_life-of-pi I would search for s157_life-of-pi as it may have already been posted as https://www.rockfm.co.uk/s157_life-of-pi or https://www.key103.co.uk/s157_life-of-pi and if I wanted to post https://www.realradioyorkshire.co.uk/preview/afe14 I would search for afe14 as it may already be there from https://www.realradiowales.co.uk/preview/afe14

The prize and answer can be useful search terms, but often the same prize and question can appear on multiple sites - current examples include berio AND 1867 or quartet AND hoffman

A lot of dupes happen within minutes of each other for two main reasons. Two people can post at exactly the same time, and also the search will not pick up comps posted in the last few minutes anyway. To avoid these you can repeat your search after typing your post but before pressing the submit button. It is also good to refresh the forum view and manually scan the most recent posts to see if someone else has just posted. I look at all posts with "views" in the right hand column less than 10 as these have probably not yet been indexed for the search function.

Despite all this I still manage to post dupes and probably always will.

One-Eye

Marg2k8 wrote: »

I am not sure if the search is case sensitive, so I would always search on say gatwick and Gatwick

search is not case sensitive - searching gatwick will find Gatwick. if you use the AND operator it must be in capitals.

A further point is to watch out for domains with joined up words. For example, searching for healthy AND back or healthybackbag may not find comps as they are posted under thehealthybackbag domain

beardedsalmon

Thanks for all the tips everyone!!

i'll try and incorporate these going forward!

:beer:

Barnabysue

I think this is why we discussed and decided to post what search terms we used in the thread when reporting duplicate posts. To give the OP an idea what to use if they come across another from that site. I generally use the way Toniq said, femalefirst as one word, for Facebook I would use facebook.com/femalefirst, it does help with those if posters post the page link as well as the post link.