Improve my searching abilities.

December 3, 2012 6:01 PM

What do I need to search to find askme posts about a partner moving out?

I know I've read posts like this but can't seem to find them. I also can't figure out how to search two tags at once. Thank you!

posted by Pericardium to MetaFilter-Related at 6:01 PM (12 comments total)

If you search with two tags and a plus sign between them, you can search two tags at once. The way I usually do this is browse one tag like art and then you see the tags down the side? Clicking one of them will just start searching that tag instead. But clicking the + sign next to any one of them will search for any posts that have both those tags, like art and book. Relationship stuff is trickier because you have to think about what people might call that sort of thing. So like one possibility is breakup+moving, another is moving+relationship.

You can also go to the regular search page and search for multiple words (Google is better for searching for phrases in quotes but you can limit to site: ask.metafilter.com) like partner moving breakup and limit it to just Ask MetaFilter which is somewhat helpful. You can also look at tag lists associated with those words and see if it helps jog your memory at all.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:12 PM on December 3, 2012 [8 favorites]

butt+elephant
posted by Melismata at 6:58 PM on December 3, 2012 [6 favorites]

You can also search anonymous' activity from his its their the profile page.
posted by carsonb at 11:05 PM on December 3, 2012 [2 favorites]

It's too bad there's no way to + tags for a single user. I tried the first format that came to mind:

http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/relationships+moving/17564

and it came back zeros for 'relationships' + 'moving/17564' on a regular old tag search of the whole site.
posted by carsonb at 11:15 PM on December 3, 2012

I got 111 results by searching the two tags off the anonymous' profile...?
posted by mannequito at 1:44 AM on December 4, 2012

butts+lol
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:11 AM on December 4, 2012 [2 favorites]

mannequito: Difference between doing a keyword search of a user's activity (like I suggested in the first comment) and clicking one of the 'most used tags' links (like relationships) to get all the questions that user has tagged with that keyword. Click that link, and look, you can scan down the list on the right and find 'moving +' but that whole list ignores the fact that you're viewing the tagged posts of a single user, and simply takes you to either the whole site's results for a given tag or the whole site's results for the two tags together if you click the +.
posted by carsonb at 5:13 AM on December 4, 2012

Yeah, that's really misleading, because judging by the numbers next to each of those +tag links, it really, really looks like you're just going to be getting that user's tagged posts.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 5:02 PM on December 4, 2012

Shoutout to pb? Can I hijack this thread and make a feature request? Doubling up tags by a single user?
posted by carsonb at 5:28 PM on December 4, 2012

Updating the related tags list on the right of a user's tag usage page to keep it within the user?
posted by carsonb at 5:29 PM on December 4, 2012

Shoutout to pb? Can I hijack this thread and make a feature request? Doubling up tags by a single user?

Email the contact form please?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:11 PM on December 4, 2012

Done.
posted by carsonb at 6:20 PM on December 4, 2012