Cohousing-L Mailing List: Archive Search notes

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

At present their are 4 ways to search archives of cohousing-L

Subject line search: 
      http://nzpp.virtualave.net/coho/

Full text of main archives (CSF): (See notes below)
      http://csf.colorado.edu/cohousing/glimpse.html

Yahoo groups full text search of archives at Yahoo groups
      http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cohousing-L/messages

Subject structured archives 
http://141.211.200.72/%7Earagon/tcn/struct/contents.html

Notes:

The Full text search of the main archives at CSF 

is the most general search facility of cohousing-L archives but it does
have a number of limitations.  We are exploring alternatives.

Usage notes.

Getting more hits.
One of the main limits is that by default it only returns the hits in the
first 100 files and has no link to additional hits.  It is possible to get
more than hits from 100 files by the following procedure. (I'll use a
search for "N Street" (without quotes) as an example.

Search the normal way.
Then edit the long complicated URL of the result to increase the number
in the portion that reads

 maxfiles=100

In my example the results included 159 hits in 101 files
after setting maxfiles=500 I got   362 hits in 231 files

Apparently the default when more than one word is entered in the target
form is to search for those two words adjacent as typed.

There is an AND operator ";" but I think it finds the two words
both in some line in the archives.
N ; Street
gets one more hit having found a line with "street and N St."

There is and or operator also ","

There is no NOT operator.

Generally once a hit is found messages related (same subject or time span) 
can be found by clicking on the "date" link on the message's page and
browsing the message index.



Other search engine notes.

The Yahoo groups archive search engine is mainly limited by the archive
being incomplete (no messages before 1996 and some missing from early
2001).  I found no documentation on the message search engine - anyone
know details on how it works?

The subject structured archive is not a search engine but groups messages
in logical categories.  It's main limitation is that it only covers
mailings from 1993 - 1995

The Subject line search works great, has veratile boolean operaators
but of course is limited by the quality of subject lines.

I'll put a link to this message on the Cohousing-L "info" page,
there is a link to the info page at the bottom of every Cohousing-L
message.

Fred

--
Fred H. Olson  fholson [at] cohousing.org    Minneapolis,MN   55411
(612)588-9532  Amateur radio: WB0YQM          List manager of:
Cohousing-L and Nbhd-tc (Twin Cities Neighborhood issues list)
More info:   http://www.mtn.org/~fholson/sig-detail.htm



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