Searching within a category across Ask comments?

August 22, 2010 7:15 AM

Is there a way to limit a search of Ask to a specific category?

It says in the FAQ "AskMe also has categories which can be used with tags for more specific searching", but there is no explanation of how to use them while searching.

For example, lets say I'm looking for the word banana in comments replying to posts in the category Food and Drink. I can search the site for banana, and then drill down to show comments from Ask. This brings up 2674 matches.

Is there any way to drill down further into this search (comments on Ask containing the word banana) to look in a specific category (comments in the category Food and Drink on Ask containing the word banana)?

posted by Solomon to MetaFilter-Related at 7:15 AM (6 comments total)

You can do this.
posted by Houstonian at 7:29 AM on August 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

I would search google like this: "to food & drink at" banana site:ask.metafilter.com

I rarely use the internal site search.
posted by donnagirl at 7:29 AM on August 22, 2010 [5 favorites]

With this search, by the way, Juliet Banana and Go Banana give you a few false hits.
posted by donnagirl at 7:34 AM on August 22, 2010

No, there's no way to do this with the internal search. It's on our feature list for the next round of search revisions sometime in the future. The FAQ is referring to viewing tag and category pages, sorry about the confusion there.

donnagirl's Google search is probably your best bet right now.
posted by pb (staff) at 7:59 AM on August 22, 2010

Would you believe I actually looked for the best answer button?

Thanks for the tips.
posted by Solomon at 8:16 AM on August 22, 2010

If you don't mind searching just the above-the-fold parts, you can also do this.
posted by salvia at 12:16 PM on August 22, 2010