one enhancement I'd like to see is the ability to search through my comments only

June 6, 2006 9:22 PM

Feature request: onsite search is back, and one enhancement I'd like to see is the ability to search through my comments only. [more]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to Feature Requests at 9:22 PM (18 comments total)

I've written so much on this site over the years, I'd like to be able to revisit some of it. Searching for keywords in my comments only would be a nice way to do that. It could be search on an arbitrary user, I suppose, but that might be a little stalkeriffic, so I'd be happy just for it to be limited to searching through posts for the currently logged-in user only.

Alternately, if anyone has any semi-foolproof search engine syntax to do it, that'd be nice. I haven't been able to come up with much that didn't return way more noise than signal.

This may not be something that many people want, but I thought I'd through it out there to see, just in case.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:23 PM on June 6, 2006

Er, throw. Damn it.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:23 PM on June 6, 2006

Good idea! Maybe a keyword operator like user:2238 to narrow the search to only that user's comments and posts.
posted by evariste at 9:59 PM on June 6, 2006

My site doesn't have user registration yet, so I have a "nick:" operator. eg, a search for nick:stavros stalkerrific would bring up your first comment in this thread.
posted by evariste at 10:01 PM on June 6, 2006

I stole the keyword->SQL parser from somewhere else and modified it for my own purposes, but it's PHP. Matt, you're welcome to some source code if you're interested.
posted by evariste at 10:03 PM on June 6, 2006

Not that it's rocket surgery or anything.

Anyway, I'll shut up.
posted by evariste at 10:09 PM on June 6, 2006

I'd like the ability to search for things based on vauge ideas.
posted by delmoi at 10:23 PM on June 6, 2006

I don't think php code will work to well with cold fusion.
posted by delmoi at 10:24 PM on June 6, 2006

No, but ideas are ideas. I assume Matt can read it and sort of get the gist. Not that it would be that hard to do from scratch, but y'know.
posted by evariste at 10:26 PM on June 6, 2006

Yeah, stavros, I was definitely going to do search for just your contributions once I get the comment indexes built I can offer something like that.

Other future search features:
- search within your favorites (which of my favorites was about mushrooms?)
- search within tags (search for all questions with the word music in them that also have the nyc tag)
- comment search (maybe!)
- search for stuff by any username (all posts about alcohol by Miguel)
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:36 PM on June 6, 2006

Search within tags-cool!
posted by evariste at 10:41 PM on June 6, 2006

In the meantime, Google:
site:www.metafilter.com "posted by stavrosthewonderchicken"
posted by kirkaracha at 10:49 PM on June 6, 2006

Cool bananas. Thanks!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:28 PM on June 6, 2006

(And please don't just put that one on a 3x5 card, Matt! Heh.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:32 PM on June 6, 2006

Wednesday = work gets done day. Index cards bedamned!
posted by cortex at 6:25 AM on June 7, 2006

good stuff, thanks
posted by matteo at 9:35 AM on June 7, 2006

mathowie : "all posts about alcohol by Miguel"

Wouldn't it be easier to just search for all posts by Miguel?
posted by graventy at 10:14 AM on June 7, 2006

kirkaracha: I knew my nick would come to haunt me.

site:www.metafilter.com "posted by ?!" meh.
posted by ?! at 10:46 AM on June 7, 2006