Aa
When you do a search on a topic, in what order do the posts appear?
I always seem to get a list of posts from 2005. Surely they don't come up in order of age, oldest first, do they? Is it by how many responses the post got?
I'll try appending 2013, too bad adding July won't help. I didn't know that you can choose a time frame on Google search. Thanks.
Hi, Annie,
This feature's on our list of considerations for future updates, but in the meantime, you can try appending "2013" to your search term -- that usually (but not always) works to drill down in the results a bit. I should add that adding a month or a specific date to the search terms doesn't seem to be useful.
As Kirstie suggested, Google's helpful too -- if you want to try that (and you aren't already doing this), try refining your search terms by clicking the Tools dropdown and choosing a time frame for your results, down to the past 24 hours.
"Relevance" is determined by keywords found in a thread. In a long thread, the number of times those keywords are used is likely to increase, so that may be why they're showing up first.
This feature's on our list of considerations for future updates, but in the meantime, you can try appending "2013" to your search term -- that usually (but not always) works to drill down in the results a bit. I should add that adding a month or a specific date to the search terms doesn't seem to be useful.
As Kirstie suggested, Google's helpful too -- if you want to try that (and you aren't already doing this), try refining your search terms by clicking the Tools dropdown and choosing a time frame for your results, down to the past 24 hours.
"Relevance" is determined by keywords found in a thread. In a long thread, the number of times those keywords are used is likely to increase, so that may be why they're showing up first.
Here is what I was trying to do. Sometimes, someone will post a who's-the-babydaddy post in a forum that is not the DNA/Paternity forum. They pop up all over -- Maternal & Child, Women's Health, especially in the teen pregnancy and young-women pregnancy forums -- and they often get either wrong information or rude responses having to do with "you should not have slept with two guys in the same cycle." So the other day I keyed in "Who is the father?" on the search bar, thinking I would find some of those recent orphaned posts to tag as miscategorized, at which point they would get moved to DNA/Paternity where at least they will get answered politely. But what came up were posts from 2005. I know women are writing in to other forums with this question because they do get sent over to DNA/Paternity on occasion, but it is totally catch as catch can. If there were some way I could direct the search to be newest first, it would be something I could check regularly, and people wouldn't fall through the cracks. I know it is possible to program sorting choices into search engines, particularly simple ones like sorting by date, most recent first. It sure would be handy to have a feature here.
How do they judge "relevance?" I can't imagine MedHelp having a search engine that gives ratings for relevance. Or is that just a code word for the longest threads?
The search is designed to return the most relevant results first, regardless of date. It's definitely a feature we're looking at, though I can't make any promises about if or when anything will change.
An alternate way to search sitewide is to use Google - while Google doesn't return results in date order either, you get bigger "snippets" of the posts in the results so you can rule in/out what you were looking for. You can even narrow to specific forums.
Forgive me if I'm posting info that you already know, but to do that, you go to google.com.
type in the search word(s) you're looking for, followed by site:medhelp.org
If you have more than one word and want only results in that specific order, put them in quotes, e.g.:
"tendon injury" site:medhelp.org
If you further wanted to narrow results to just the orthopedics community, you can do that by using the URL of the specific community:
"tendon injury" site:medhelp.org/forums/Orthopedics/show/60
If the words aren't necessarily going to be in order, don't put them in quotes or you won't get results:
tendon torn hand site:medhelp.org/forums/Orthopedics/show/60
just make sure to remove the http:// and www from the URL. Hope that helps!
An alternate way to search sitewide is to use Google - while Google doesn't return results in date order either, you get bigger "snippets" of the posts in the results so you can rule in/out what you were looking for. You can even narrow to specific forums.
Forgive me if I'm posting info that you already know, but to do that, you go to google.com.
type in the search word(s) you're looking for, followed by site:medhelp.org
If you have more than one word and want only results in that specific order, put them in quotes, e.g.:
"tendon injury" site:medhelp.org
If you further wanted to narrow results to just the orthopedics community, you can do that by using the URL of the specific community:
"tendon injury" site:medhelp.org/forums/Orthopedics/show/60
If the words aren't necessarily going to be in order, don't put them in quotes or you won't get results:
tendon torn hand site:medhelp.org/forums/Orthopedics/show/60
just make sure to remove the http:// and www from the URL. Hope that helps!
I've noticed the same...it seems like the search results include more older posts than anything (which absolutely explains why so many older threads get bumped).
It would be nice if the pc gurus would make the search function to display more recent and more relevant posts FIRST, with the older ones on the end of the list. I'm sure number of responses is a big part of what shows up. Maybe they could add the criteria of showing posts from the last 6 months or something for the results on top.
It would be nice if the pc gurus would make the search function to display more recent and more relevant posts FIRST, with the older ones on the end of the list. I'm sure number of responses is a big part of what shows up. Maybe they could add the criteria of showing posts from the last 6 months or something for the results on top.
You know, I've wondered the same thing myself. I'm not sure, but I'll see if I can get an answer for you!
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