Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates Forums/Searching

This tutorial is a guide to searching the Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates Forums.

Overview
The forum search allows for Boolean, wildcard, fuzzy and proximity searching. It also allows for grouping, boosting and searching for phrases.

Note: Searching still has a bug where it doesn't give results for posts without subject/titles.

General tips

 * Use Term* to search for a given term and its plural. An exception is for short terms for which too many irrelevant results may be returned due to parts of other unrelated words matching the wildcarded term. Term OR Terms would be a more appropriate search in this case.
 * Restrict the search to a single forum if possible. This can help greatly to cut down on the number of results.

Order of results
If only the Text to search field is filled, the order of matching post results is seemingly random. The matching posts are actually ordered by relevance according to the search engine. This may be changed in the future.

Searching with only the By Login Name field filled, returns matching posts within each forum in ascending date order. The order of the forums shown is:


 * 1) A Cask of Blog
 * 2) Hear ye! Announcements
 * 3) Opal Basar
 * 4) Opal Politik und Palaver
 * 5) Spiel und Technik
 * 6) Opal Events
 * 7) Crafting Puzzle Project
 * 8) Ice Discussion
 * 9) Events Workshop
 * 10) Hunter Events
 * 11) Viridian Events
 * 12) Sage Events
 * 13) Cobalt Events
 * 14) Midnight Events
 * 15) Cobalt Bazaar
 * 16) Hunter Bazaar
 * 17) The Bazaar
 * 18) Sage Bazaar
 * 19) Midnight Bazaar
 * 20) Viridian Bazaar
 * 21) New Player Forum
 * 22) Cobalt Parley
 * 23) Viridian Parley
 * 24) Hunter Parley
 * 25) Sage Parley
 * 26) Midnight Parley
 * 27) Technical Issues
 * 28) Events!
 * 29) The Mariner's Muse
 * 30) Piratical Parley and Politics
 * 31) Tips & Tricks, Questions & Answers
 * 32) Davy Jones' Locker
 * 33) Shore Leave
 * 34) Game Design

If there is something in both the Text to search and By Login Name fields, the matching posts will be in relevance order.

Search fields details
These constraints are applied as AND terms to matching results.

Text to search
This field contains the terms used to perform the search. Terms can be plain words to find or contain any of the following operators:


 * 1) Boolean
 * 2) Wildcard
 * 3) Fuzzy search
 * 4) Proximity search
 * 5) Boost

Boolean terms
The following are the allowed Boolean terms:


 * AND
 * OR
 * NOT

AND
If you want to search for all your terms, then use:


 * Term1 AND Term2 AND Term3 (and so on)
 * Example: Zeta AND Zambonies

If you fill in the login name field, the search will automatically require that as an additional AND condition. Result posts will have the corresponding login name.

OR
If you want to search for any of your terms, then use:


 * Term1 OR Term2 OR Term3 (and so on)
 * Example: Zambonies OR Governor

This is the default boolean term used if none is supplied which is different behavior to most Internet search engines.


 * Example: Zambonies Governor

would search for any of the terms.

NOT
If you want to search for one term but exclude results which have a second term, then use:


 * Term1 NOT Term2
 * Example: Zeta NOT Zambonies

Combination
You can use AND, OR, and NOT in various combinations for your search terms.


 * Example: Zeta AND Governor NOT Zambonies

Grouping
You can use parentheses to control the order in which Boolean terms are applied.


 * Example: (Zeta OR Governor) AND Zambonies
 * would be equivalent to combining the results of these two searches:


 * 1) Zeta AND Zambonies
 * 2) Governor AND Zambonies
 * Example: (Zeta AND Governor) OR Zambonies
 * would be equivalent to combining the results of these two searches:


 * 1) Zeta AND Governor
 * 2) Zambonies

Wildcard characters
The following characters are the available wildcard charaters:



These characters cannot be used as the first character in a term. However they can be used multiple times elsewhere in a term including as the last character of a term.

"?"
If you want to search for any term which differs from a given term by one letter, then use the single character wildcard.


 * Example: "Z?ta" will match these terms (amongst many others):
 * Zata, Zbta, Zcta

"*"
If you want to search for any term which differs from a given term by zero or more letters, then use the multiple character wildcard.


 * Example: "Z*ta" will match these terms (amongst many others):
 * Zta, Zata, Zaata, Zbta

Fuzzy searches
The ~ character allows fuzzy searching. If you want to search for terms which are similar in spelling to a given one, use:


 * Term~
 * Example: Zeta~

An additional optional parameter indicates the required similarity. Use:


 * Term~similarity parameter
 * Example: Zeta~0.8

The value of the parameter is between 0 and 1; with a value closer to 1 only terms with a higher similarity will be matched. The default value used if the parameter is not provided is 0.5.

Search already takes into account differences between American and British spelling as well as common typos.

Technical note: Fuzzy searches are performed using the Levenshtein distance, or Edit Distance algorithm.

Proximity searches
The ~ character also allows for proximity searching. Despite the same character as fuzzy searching being used, the meaning of these two searches is quite different. If you want to search for terms which are within a specified distance away, use:


 * "Term1 Term2"~distance
 * Example: "Zeta Governor"~10

If the distance parameter is omitted, it defaults to zero. This enables search terms which are strings of more than one word to be specified.


 * Example: "box edition"
 * Compare this with the search terms, box edition, or box AND edition.

Boosting
The ^ character is used at the end of a term to increase the relevance of a term and thus affect the order of search results. Use:


 * Term1^boost factor Term2
 * Example: Zeta^5 Governor

The boost factor defaults to 1. Although the boost factor must be positive, it can be less than 1 (e.g. 0.3).

By Login Name
This field restricts results to those posts with the given forum login name.

Scope in the post
This field determines how much of a post is to be searched. You can choose from the following: The default setting is to search both the title and the body of a post.
 * 1) Post title and body
 * 2) Only post title
 * 3) Only post body

In Category/Forum
This field allows the search to be restricted to a given forum. The default setting is to search all forums.

By date
This field restricts results to be either newer or older than the following timeframes:
 * 1) Yesterday
 * 2) A week ago
 * 3) 2 weeks ago
 * 4) A month ago
 * 5) 3 months ago
 * 6) 6 months ago
 * 7) A year ago

By attachment
This field requires results to have at least 0-9 attachments. Given that attachments are disabled in the Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates Forums, this field is not useful at present.

Result per page
This field does not restrict search results. Rather it changes how many results are returned on a page.