Post Tab Search and Internet Search Confusion

[nc_usenet]

I am running 6.0b6 Build:870 and need some help with Searching.
Situation: There is a guy named "John A Smith" I want to find all posts (both downloaded and on the internet) that contain his name.
The posts may actually contain: John Smith or Smith, John or Smith, John A., etc

What should I enter in the Search box for posts?
What should I enter in the Internet Search tab?

In the Post tabs Search Box:
If I enter John Smith Does not find Smith, John or John A. Smith
If I enter Smith John Does not find John Smith

As a workaround, I tried to use the Search tab, with the type set to local, but had problems.
The V6 Help says that the order of the keywords doesn't matter, but it appears that order does matter for local searches. Searching for John Smith and then Smith John yields very different results.

It does appear, that an Internet search yields all the desired posts simply by entering John Smith.

Thanks

[itimpi]

Internet search and local search use different syntax. The difference has arisen from both historical reasons, and also the difference in technology at the client and server ends.

You are correct that for internet search it is just the keywords that matter, and the order is not important (unless you enclose words in quotes to mean an exact match).

Local search uses regex syntax. As you spotted here the order is significant, but you should be able to get around this by using the | symbol for the logical 'or' operator to allow you to specify alternatives.

[nc_usenet]

As you spotted here the order is significant, but you should be able to get around this by using the | symbol for the logical 'or' operator to allow you to specify alternatives.

Thanks for the response.
It appears a bit more complicated than just using John Smith | Smith John.
Using the above does not find Smith, John (and probably others)
Now I have to account for all of the possible characters separating words & the order for John A Smith.
In the Regex Forum was the following post (from 2005)

If you need to find posts with, say, three words in any order, you can go crazy with all the possible orders, separated with '|' chars or...
You could just use a series of "lookahead" operations.
(?=foo) means "followed by foo" and (?=.*foo) means followed by any number of chars and then foo. You can combine this with the line-start char '^' and get ^(?=.*foo) which means "start of line followed by any number of chars and then foo" - and these lookahead expressions can be stacked, so, to get a post with foo, bar and blat in any order you can use: ^(?=.*foo)(?=.*bar)(?=.*blat)

OMG :
So it looks like I would need to enter ^(?=.*john)(?=.*smith)
I really (really!) wish there was a simple keyword search

[Quade]

"john.*smith|smith.*john"

[nc_usenet]

"john.*smith|smith.*john"

This is a lot better than the other expression (but still a lot more typing than just john smith ), Based on itimpi's post, should I assume that a keyword search is not on "the list"?

[Quade]

I'd assume nothing. Was toying with the idea of generating regexes internally to emulate keyword search while still leaving the power of regex in place. There's just no time for it right now.

[Redbird]

On a similar topic, it is still possible to perform a search in the Download tab, as in V5?

It's a usefull feature to promote some files to top, while usually donwloading by date.

[richy99]

not yet no