[SOLVED] Search doesn't work for me. What am I doing wrong?

silverlining · 02-02-2020, 09:34 PM

I'm new here and can't make heads nor tails of Search. For instance, I make it simple and tell the search window to search for awk and it returns, Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms. About half the times that I try to search, I get, The LinuxQuestions.org database has encountered a problem.

I happened to find a different way that works but it seems it's not the normal way. I go to a forum, then click the New Thread button. In the Subject, I type the word awk. Then when I click on the button, Click Here to Find Similar Threads, I see lots of them listed. Surely that's not the intended way to search!

I also found a [SOLVED] post #786514 (I think), which told how to use Goggle to search. I tried it that way and got screens full of LinuxQuestion.com answers.

If I can't even find one word, how do I do a complicated search with several words?

business_kid · 02-03-2020, 03:50 AM

It works here, even with pretty heavy JS restrictions. (I don't even know if it uses javascript).
Have you tried a different browser?

jsbjsb001 · 02-03-2020, 04:40 AM

You're not alone... I've lost count of the amount of times LQ Search has failed me - I've even gotten that exact same error message myself. I usually give up and use Google instead...

According to Jeremy, when (or if) he ever brings us LQ 2.0, LQ Search will be "much better". But who knows when that'll be...

silverlining · 02-03-2020, 10:37 AM

@business_kid, Chrome and Firefox--latest versions--both say Sorry - no matches.

It's not a big deal. I just thought I was doing something wrong.

jeremy · 02-03-2020, 11:21 AM

Single word searches need to be a minimum of 4 letters to return results. While the next code update will contain an improved search, note that in the content of LQ, "awk" is not likely to return useful responses.

--jeremy

silverlining · 02-03-2020, 11:32 AM

Thank you, Jeremy. I've looked but didn't find any page with tips explaining how to properly search. Is such a page somewhere on the site? At any rate, this is a wonderful site!

jeremy · 02-03-2020, 11:37 AM

We don't have much in the way of tips, but in general my advice for LQ search is the same as search in general: be as specific as possible. ie. in this case, what are you looking to do with awk? The information we do have on the search is available here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...faq_vb3_search

--jeremy

silverlining · 02-03-2020, 11:47 AM

Now I understand some of my errors. Thank you, and I'll mark this as solved.

teckk · 02-03-2020, 12:43 PM

Use google, that's what it is for. That's why they get the big bucks.

Open web browser to:

Code:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:linuxquestions.org+awk&amp;gws_rd=ssl&num=50

silverlining · 02-03-2020, 12:47 PM

Yeah, that does work pretty well!

vtel57 · 02-03-2020, 12:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by teckk

That's why they get the big bucks.

They get the big bucks by sucking up all your data and metadata and then selling it to 3rd parties who make big bucks using it to feed the world advertising [removed].

That's how it works.

Don't feed the monster (Google). DDG instead.

silverlining · 02-03-2020, 12:59 PM

That's interesting!

teckk · 02-03-2020, 01:01 PM

If you want to search LQ, using google, without using a web browser.

Code:

agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.1; WOW64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0"

url="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:linuxquestions.org"

read -p "Enter search word for linuxquestions.org: " search_word

html=$(curl -sLA "$agent" ""$url"+"$search_word"&amp;gws_rd=ssl&num=50") 

grep -oP 'class="r"><a href="\K[^"]+' <<< "$html"

silverlining · 02-03-2020, 01:27 PM

Wow! That's neat! Looks fun to try to figure out how it is doing that. Just storing some shell variables, then grep puts it all together? I love things I can do at the command line.

rnturn · 02-13-2020, 05:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeremy

Single word searches need to be a minimum of 4 letters to return results. While the next code update will contain an improved search, note that in the content of LQ, "awk" is not likely to return useful responses.

--jeremy

Does that include search strings in quotes? Or is a search for, say, "debug pam" still going to be a waste of time?

Every time I attempt a search for that string, I keep getting that error message with the option to "Refresh" (I mentioned this in another post.) "Refresh" takes me back to Advanced Search. Repeating the search seems is immediately looping back to the error page every time. (If it's timing out, the timeout value is in milliseconds.)