[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Pingeroo.

Did you ever try this?

[Momaw Nadon]

Clever!

[perfect stranger]

Thank you. I was curious if that would be a way around the limitation, but never bothered to test the theory.

I will now and the first word would have to be "ZOT".

[rs79bm]

Is this search "live" or does it just come up with an archive that Google has previously indexed.

[chnsmok]

It worked for nfl but not zot. drat.

[Timesink]

Google only caches a tiny, tiny subset of FR threads. It's good for an "isn't there ANYTHING?" desperation search, but you can be sure you're only getting about 1% of the actual matching threads when you run a search.

[dennisw]

For example, to find all threads relating to the NFL simply type this into the Google search box:

NFL site:www.freerepublic.com
_______________________________

You will not "find all threads" as you put it. You will find a few threads. For whatever reason most FreeRepublic threads are omitted by google

[k2blader]

Thanks! Helpful tip.

[livius]

Thank you. I've printed this out. I don't post original articles very much, and I don't know how often Google updates, but this was certainly an approach I'd never thought of before!

[GraniteStateConservative]

What we need is the ability to search replies. Many times I've posted political numbers-crunching information that I'd like to be able to retrieve in the future when it would apply again. Delphi groups has a nice advanced search feature-- search replies by poster to postee by time frame, for example.

[Billthedrill]

Already posted HERE.

F'Petessake, don't you ever search before posting? ;-)

[ml/nj]

It didn't really work.

I restricted the search to "freerepublic.com" and searched for the exact phrase: "ML/NJ"; it found 8 items scattered over several years.

ML/NJ

[Prodigal Son]

Good info thanks.

[aculeus]

As you may or may not know, the FR search function doesn't work on words that are less than 4 letters.

Which explains why my search for "spy" was a failure.

Thanks for the tip.

[RonDog]

I have discovered a way to search Free Republic for any word that is 3 letters or less. As you may or may not know, the FR search function doesn't work on words that are less than 4 letters.

There is ANOTHER way - which can find virtually ALL threads on FR - using FR's internal search engine, and adding a SECOND 4+ letter word as a qualifier.

See, from:

Free Republic Search Engine *Experimental*
Search Free Republic ^

Posted on 12/07/2001 3:41 PM PST by John Robinson
I've placed online an experimental search engine. It currently only searches article titles. If the technology proves worthy, I'll try to expand it to search articles and commentary. If it cooks the server, it's outta here.

It has a few interesting features, please give it a whirl...

-- snip --

To: John Robinson; WIMom

Well, this search engine is a hybrid.
The workhorse is the FULLTEXT index facility included with recent versions of MySQL, this workhorse ignores three-letter words. If you give the workhorse only three-letter words, it will return nothing.

However, if you give the workhorse something it can find, like "song" and "parody" and use "match all" or "match exact", my code will further restrict what the workhorse finds-- it takes the results from the workhorse and then filters them again. So if you are looking for "song", "parody", and "you", the workhorse ignores "you", finds many records with "song" and/or "parody", gives those results to my code, which then makes sure each has "song" AND "parody" AND "you".

And my code is not invoked if you do a "match any"; so "match any" will never find a three-letter word.

This might sound amazingly complicated, but it really isn't that much code. :-) [John Robinson]

I see. So a "work-around" for the "ignore three-letter words" problem is to include in the search SOMETHING ELSE, which is longer than four characters, like:

fbi files - rather than just FBI
irs taxes - rather than just IRS
fox news - rather than just FOX
freep cnn - rather than just CNN

Also, FOUR-letter words - by themselves - seem to be O.K.:

waco
news
gore

108 posted on 12/08/2001 2:36 PM PST by RonDog

The links do not work any more, but the strategy is still valid, IMHO...

[TigersEye]

bttt to keep tabs

[Rebelbase]

A Tool to help with FR searches before posting.

[Valin]

Bump

[dixie sass]

Thanks