SEARCH Paid Subscription Trouble

[andy]

You can ask NSA — I subscribed to the SEARCH service during the first week or so it was offered, and have done so since. If you keep any stats (please do...), I'd be surprised if anyone equals my number of searches. Generally I'm happy with the service. Like the built-in INDEX in windows, this search takes certain shortcuts (apostrophe (')- what is that?), liberties (quotation marks, question marks & Unicode characters (虎夢 is my name 'Hǔ mèng' in Chinese)) problematic, and for that matter the closing double parenthesis.

I often type in the name of a song, since I collect multiple covers of multiple songs. Tonight the SEARCH service crapped a sandpaper football.

I typed in "Its Now Or Never", without the quotes and missing the usually unrecognized apostrophe. The result did not contain one line in twenty with even the sub-phrase "Now Or Never", no quotes. It has seldom cared about capitalization. nsa is the same as NSA and so on.

What gives?? The SEARCH, in the last 48 hours, has taken a major turn for the useless. Try it. Then tell me what I did wrong. Nothing has changed in years, no sub-filters or specifications, searching the entire internet (as GigaNews sees it). What? Eh??

[Quade]

I asked Dex to look into it.

[dexter]

It is a coincidence. You actually uncovered a bug (or found a feature?). The search frontend is taking the "or" in your string and applying a logical or. So it turns in to "its now | never".

Any suggestions on how to differentiate between a logical "OR" and a literal or? I could make it case sensitive and make lower case or's be taken literally and upper case OR be used as a logical "or". What do you think of that?

[dexter]

I went ahead and made the change since I discovered I had documented it to work that way already. One case where the documentation was ahead of the code. Oh well.

http://www.newsbin.com/isearchhelp.php

You can also quote your phrase in double quotes and Search will attempt to do a phrase match instead of a boolean match which should yield more relevant results.

Let me know how it works for you.

[andy]

Dexter & Quade ... ... ... Gentlemen:
That's the first acknowledged "bug" I've found in over twelve years of earnest, even strident, reporting. Usually you team up to unscrew my head a rev or two and set me straight.

I read the docs, and thank you humbly. When I began an electronics career in earnest in 1969 I wrote instruction manuals for secret military black-boxes. Integrated circuits were pretty new then, like the 7400 Quad NAND gate package. It took about an hour for the Old Man to slap me up beside the head and convince me to never, ever, even thinking about writing or even softly intoning the Holy Quint (AND, OR, NOT, NOR, and NAND) in any but capital spelling (the afore-mentioned AND and and an example). Geezus, guys, I have never had the pleasure of writing "and" three times in a row with even glancing grammatical correctness. Thanks, thanks!

What I especially like is the new handling of a "a quoted phrase" to seek the major words in order, and its ability to find 'QuOtEd PhRaSe' and all the variants and mutations without looking for the double quote marks themselves. I assume if I wanted the cumbersome clutch I would type the folloring into the search line:
""a quoted phrase"" using doublets of double quotes? Thanks for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to apply a dash of assonance.
...
...
Yo, Bubbas!
I just tried (It's Now Or Never) (no parenthesis) and got 1121 damn good lines of results. Now it's up to GigaNooze and the DMCA Goons to see if Our Lady of Completion and Retention killed my catch/cache ... and there's few times "catch" or "cache" can be used more-or-less interchangeably. I'll explore further useage nuances of quotes/Boolean searches. Thanks again