There have been some comments regarding searching on BeechTalk and I wanted to take a moment to explain some of the basics on how to use the search interface. Once you become familiar with how to search and understand the effects of your searching choices, you'll better be able to find information on a chosen subject or posted by a particular individual.

How to access the search page?
To begin a search, you need to hover your mouse over the 'Search' link in the red bar near the top of the page, then click the first option "Advanced Search'. Once selected, you will be presented with the main search page that is divided between the Search Query section and the Search Options section.

How to perform just a simple and quick search?
The quickest way to perform a search is to simply type the keywords (such as Turbo, Osborne, or TKS) into the 'Search for keywords' window and click the 'Search' button at the bottom of the page. This will search the database for all posts, in all of the forums and subforums irrespective of date, containing the keywords and present a listing of such individual posts.

How to narrow or tailor a search strategy?
Naturally, you may encounter more hits than you desire, so you can narrow your search using any or all of the modifiers below:


• Keywords - Place + (the plus sign) in front of a word which must be found and - (the minus sign) in front of a word which must not be found. If only one term of a plurality of terms needs to be found, please select 'Search for any term' under the keyword entry window. Use * (the asterisk sign) as a wildcard for partial matches.
  
• Search for author - If you know the author of the post you are trying to locate, enter their BeechTalk username (noting the correct spelling and any punctuation in the author's screenname). Use * (the asterisk sign) as a wildcard for partial matches. Please note that if you are looking for posts or threads from one BeechTalk member, you can also go to their profile page (under their avatar image) and click 'Search user's posts' or 'Search threads started by user' to get the results perhaps easier. You can also use these direct links to search for your own threads or posts.
  
• Search in forums - Select the forum or forums you wish to search by highlighting the forum name in the list to the right. Multiple forums can be selected by pressing and holding the CTRL or Command key on your keyboard and selecting the forums you wish to include. Subforums are searched automatically if you do not disable “search subforums“ in the Search Option section at the bottom of the page.
  
• Search subforums - Select Yes if you'd like to automatically include subforums in the list of forums to be searched when only a general forum is selected. In other words, if you select 'General Forums' as a forum to be searched without selecting anything else, if 'Search subforums' is set to Yes, the system will automatically include the Plane Talk, Panel Talk, Journal Talk, and other forums that are shown indented under General Forums. If 'Search subforums' is set to No, the system will not automatically include these subforums and will restrict the search to the (empty) General Forums.
  
• Sort results by - This feature permits you to display the search results in an order that may better suit your search needs. For instance, you can have the result sorted by author, post time (default), forum, etc.
  
• Limit results to previous - This feature permits you to put a date limiter on the search. For instance, you can limit your results to only those posts that were posted in the previous 7 days that also meet the other search criteria.
  
• Search within - This can be a very helpful feature in locating a post or thread that you know exists or one that is specifically tailor to your issue. In this way, you can limit the search to look for the noted keyword(s) in only the message text (body of the post), topic title (the subject of the post or thread title), the first post of threads, or both the subject and message text.
  
• Display results as - This feature allows you to display the results of the search as individual posts or as a single thread. For example, if this feature is set to 'Posts', if two posts in a single thread meet the search criteria, both posts will be listed in the search results. However, if this feature is set to 'Topics', if two posts in a single thread meet the search criteria, only the thread will be listed in the search results. This is helpful in finding entire discussions on a topic or simplifying your search results so you can locate the threads that most related to your issue.
  
• Return first - This feature is used to limit the total number of hits your search will display.

For information on the other searches listed in the Search menu, please click here.

so BT and its success has created a whole lot of information. Being able to search for stuff effectively is important. I don't think any online forum will ever get to a state where questions aren't frequently repeated (particularly by newbies), but perhaps we could help the cause by a little tutorial on how to search properly.

Of course, all should go to Jeff's primer here first: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=43128

But I wanted to start this thread to go into further detail on tools that can be used for keyword searches, as I have some questions and want to get a little technical dialogue going.

The easy stuff:
THE PLUS SIGN + use it to make a word a mandatory find
e.g. if you want to find something about the D18 twin beech, best put in: +twin +beech. Putting in just twin beech is not going to be fruitful, or rather, it will be too fruitful by yielding too many results.

THE MINUS SIGN - use it to ensure a word is excluded
e.g. if you want to search about turbos but don't want bonanza info them perhaps try this: turbo TC -bonanza -A36 -B36 -A36TC -B36TC

A little more advanced
QUOTES ""
In the above example (+twin +beech), the first search isn't ideal because you'll get a lot posts that somewhere have twin and elsewhere have beech. A better strategy is to type it in quotes: "twin beech"

WILDCARDS *
handy for capturing plurals. typing in bahama* will get you results where both bahama and bahamas were written. Also there are obvious other areas where it is useful.

now for some questions.
parentheses ()
do these work, kind of like in ebay searches? e.g. +(x, y) +(z, "t s") -(u, v) where the letters represent words. Would it work, in the way that it would have to find x or y and z or "t s" and not u and not v

word length minimum, common word exclusions? it appears that doing a -A36 is effective, however searching a -for is not effective

it appears there is no case sensitivity. Is there a way to impose case sensitivity?


what am i forgetting? any other helpful hints/tricks?

thanks, and let's all practice better searching