Cohousing-L Mailing List: Archive Search links & notes -- improved --

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

This is an updated version of message posted July 7, 2001 In addition to
correcting some typos and poor wording, I've added something about "Number
of errors allowed" at CSF.  And a note about searching for dates with the
Subject search.    Fred


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



CSF full text search 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.

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 in all examples) 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"

to increase the "100" and fetch the results of the modified URL.
(usually, just hit a carriage return)

In my example the results included 
159 hits in 101 files with the default "maxfiles=100" 
362 hits in 231 files after setting "maxfiles=500" 

Apparently the default when more than one word separated by a space 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 the SAME LINE in the archives.
"N ; Street"
gets one more hit having found a line with "street and N St."

There is a OR operator: ","   (comma)

There is no NOT operator.

The option: "Number of errors allowed" on the search form allows 
for hits to similarly spelled strings.  For example, a search for
"Bronson"
gets no hits with 0 or 1 errors allowed but gets 2 hits for 2 errors
allowed: Brandon and Bresson

Generally once a hit is found, messages related (same subject ("thread")  
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 Subject line search works great, has veratile boolean operaators
but of course is limited by the quality of subject lines.
See useage notes on the search page.  Clarification:
When searching for dates, USE quotes when periods are used and use
leading zero for one digit months or days. eg "2001.07.07"  USE QUOTES.

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 still have 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 . It was done manually by Stuart Staniford-Chen.



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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