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Searching effectively

While searching on the site, you have several options to help refine your search and make it easier to find what you're looking for. Searching will search all posts across that site, including Questions, Answers, Meta posts, and whatever other post types your site may have.

Basic keyword searching

Let's say you want to search for the term snake oil. You have a few basic options:

• plain search

  If you put the text snake oil into the searchbox, the site will find all posts that contain either the word snake or oil.

• exact search (quote marks)

  If you include quote marks around your search term, such as "snake oil", the site will find all posts that contain exactly the phrase snake oil.

• keyword search (plus symbol)

  If you search for +snake +oil, the site will find all posts that contain both the words snake and oil.

• excluding words (minus symbol)

  If you want to search for snake but exclude the word oil from your results, you can do a search for snake -oil. The site will find posts that contain the word snake but do not have the word oil.

Filtering by score and age

It's possible to filter your search to only include results that have been posted within a certain timeframe, or match certain score requirements.

• filtering by post score

  The site uses Wilson scoring to help in sorting posts. (To learn more about how this works, see /help/scoring for a detailed explanation.) Every post has a score between 0.0 and 1.0. To use this in search, you can use score:0.5 to filter your search to only include posts with a score of at least 0.5.

• filtering by votes

  If you want to filter by the raw votes that a post has, you can use votes:5 to find posts where the net votes (upvotes minus downvotes) of a post equals 5 or higher.

• filtering by upvotes and downvotes

  If you search for upvotes:4, the site will find posts that have received at least 4 upvotes, irrespective of how many downvotes the post has. Likewise, if you search for downvotes:4, the site will find posts that have received at least 4 downvotes without taking upvotes into consideration. You can also use a less than (<) symbol to filter for posts that have received no more than a certain number of votes (for instance, downvotes:<4 will find posts that have received less than four downvotes total).

• filtering by creation date

  If you want to only find posts that have been written within a certain timeframe, you can use the created: search operator. created:<1w will find all posts created less than a week ago, where created:>1w will find only posts older than a week. You can use m for minute, h for hour, d for day, w for week, mo for month, and y for year.

Advanced

• wildcard

  If you search with an asterisk (*) at the end of a word, such as snake*, the site will find all posts that contain words beginning with the letters snake, including words such as snakeskin. (This does not work at the beginning of a word; only the end.)

• results for either one of two words

  Searching with parentheses will allow you to search for a keyword, and either one of two other words. For instance, +oil +(snake palm) will find posts that contain the word oil and either the word palm or snake.

• weighting keywords

  When searching with multiple keywords, you can weigh different keywords separately. Using a tilde before a word will lower that word's weight, and have the site sort results with that keyword more towards the back. For instance, +snake ~oil will find all posts that contain the word snake, but rank the results that also contain the word oil lower.

  If you're searching with parentheses, you can rank words within those parentheses differently. +snake +(>skin <oil) will find all posts that contain snake and either skin or oil, but will rank results that contain skin higher than the results that contain oil.