What's wrong with my pre-post searching?

April 3, 2007 6:22 AM

I did a google search, looked through the tags, and did a mefi search (for bee and bees) and found no posts that were related, but this still seems to be a double. Why didn't this show up in my searching? This kind of thing has happened to me on a few of my recent posts -- how can I change my search methods to find archived posts more reliably?
posted by cubby to Etiquette/Policy at 6:22 AM (20 comments total)

Check the obvious tags.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 6:28 AM on April 3, 2007

When I search google for

bees site:metafilter.com

The second link is "Posts tagged with bees", which lists that link first.

I've found the site:metafilter.com thing to be a useful thing to know.
posted by ducksauce at 6:28 AM on April 3, 2007

I did look for posts tagged with bees, and 20 mins ago the first post that came up was "oh dear lord bees" and "killered bees" was not there - though it shows up now. As with the bee disappearance, this is just weird.
posted by cubby at 6:35 AM on April 3, 2007

It's the second hit (would have been the first hit before your post was made) for a plain search for just bees.
posted by Rhomboid at 6:42 AM on April 3, 2007

For a topic with such an obvious one word topic, the tag search is the way to go. So the URL construction is like this

http://www.metafilter.com/tags/bees

But also if search tags from the search page, type in bees and click on the first tag, you'll see the other post. I'm not sure what you did that wasn't any of the suggestions above. The search function is still not perfect, but in this case it seemed to work decently for most ways of looking for this topic.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:49 AM on April 3, 2007

If anything I find the search to return too many of the same results. There are three different ways to get to the page of posts tagged with 'Bees' in just the first ten results using the search box on the front page.
posted by OmieWise at 6:59 AM on April 3, 2007

I tried everyting but ducksauce's thing (thanks for the tip), so I'm not sure what was going on (I made a spelling mistake? selective amnesia?). I guess I will just be extra careful in the future and maybe try the same search multiple times to be sure.
posted by cubby at 7:00 AM on April 3, 2007

On a related note, is there a way to search for an http:// link in the post? It seems to me this would be a surefire way to catch doubles, because you could just check if what you want to link to was ever linked to before.
posted by Pastabagel at 7:04 AM on April 3, 2007

You can use the new post form as a de facto url search if you need to, but that only works if it's a post of a specific website versus something more topical.
posted by OmieWise at 7:08 AM on April 3, 2007

It's not a big deal to double-post.

We don't force you to wear a badge that says "I've done a DP" or anything.
posted by smackfu at 7:27 AM on April 3, 2007

We don't force you to wear a badge that says "I've done a DP" or anything.

But if you want to wear that badge, please do.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 7:38 AM on April 3, 2007

But I've never done Dolly Parton.

Trust me, unless you really like gristle, it ain't worth it.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 8:20 AM on April 3, 2007

When the search engine was on the server, the best way to search for posted links was to paste the URL into the search box. Now that the search is done by yahoo, I think it's a little less reliable to do it that way.
posted by achmorrison at 8:21 AM on April 3, 2007

Yahoo still seems to find things on MeFi far more reliably than Google, too. The site:metafilter.com thing works for Yahoo as well.
posted by flabdablet at 8:38 AM on April 3, 2007

Before I make a front page post, on the posting page, I start a new post with just the domain name of the site I'm about to link to in the URL field of the posting form. http://www.shorpy.com/taxonomy/term/26 is distilled down to just shorpy.com.

This will pull up any post that was made about the site, and I can tell from the results whether it's a double or not. This trick doesn't work so well with newsfilter type posts, where 100 sites could all have the same content. It also doesn't find things that have moved from one domain to another.
posted by Dave Faris at 8:48 AM on April 3, 2007

I should change the default search box on the header/footer to actually search mefi's internal search engine, with options to view on Yahoo or Google.

A simple default search for "bees" in the mefi search found it, but it would take some digging with google or yahoo.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:17 AM on April 3, 2007

The post-DP badge I wear is the way I walk the next day
posted by wemayfreeze at 10:07 AM on April 3, 2007 [2 favorites]

I should change the default search box on the header/footer to actually search mefi's internal search engine...

agreed. it drives me a little more nuts each time i try to use it. but then i'm lazy and unobservant that way.
posted by lonefrontranger at 11:11 AM on April 3, 2007

Um, I'm really sorry. I think I can explain...

I ate a bee search result.
posted by Bugg at 11:44 AM on April 3, 2007

wemayfreeze for the win.
posted by drpynchon at 12:53 PM on April 3, 2007