An index?

[Stella Mae]

Is it possible to have some kind of index for the whole site so that, for example, if I wanted to look up a specific topic, then a list of those threads and forums would come up?

[Sue Lau]

Use Google Advanced search, using operators:

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861

Using quotation marks ('' ") around a term, demands it exactly as you typed it.

Putting a minus (-) sign in front of a term, excludes it from your search.

Put a tilde symbol (~) in front of a search term if you want results similar or synonymous to what you typed (i.e., "~food facts" will also return results for "nutrition facts".

To search within a particular website, use "site:" with the name of the site following the colon (such as site:food.com). Likewise, you can exclude results from a particular website by putting the minus sign in front (such as -site:food.com will exclude results from this website).

If you are not sure what word you want to use in the search, when looking up something like a phrase, title, or sentence, use an asterisk (*) in place of the word. Searching "I ate * for breakfast" will bring up every sentence with those words, regardless of what the person ate. So it would bring up:
I ate cereal for breakfast.
I ate scrambled eggs for breakfast.
etc.

If you know in general, but not exactly what word you want to look for, you can use the operator "OR" in between two search terms. For example, if I wanted to look up fried fish recipes or fried chicken recipes, but don't care which, or I want both, I would search for:
fried fish recipe OR fried chicken recipe

If you want a range of numbered items, use two periods (..) in between the numbers to bring them all up. This is especially good when searching items that are numbered, such as pages. For example, I might want to look up cake recipes that use varying amounts of eggs. I might search like this:
"chocolate cake" 2..4 eggs
This would bring up only chocolate cake with 2 to 4 eggs written on that page.

It is important to remember that these operators do not work using the search box here. You have to use the google search box, which most people have at the top of their browser, or you can use the address bar if using Google Chrome.
Don't worry about memorizing the operators, they are all listed on the Google Advanced search page, which you can easily find on the Google page, or searching for "Google Advanced search" on any search engine.

And to show you how great this works, I am going to do a sample search for you about this topic. I will be using these search terms:
"An Index?" site:food.com

Here is what that search yields:
http://bit.ly/TPk1XP

I hope you find this tutorial helpful, not only for searching Fooddotcom's forums, but everything on the website, including the recipe database.

I find it extremely helpful when I want to check if a recipe has already been published here, which can be a daunting task. The minus sign is really great for that, easily removing extraneous results.

You may want to add this topic to your favorites, so that you can easily access it anytime you need. But as time passes, you might find you have learned and memorized all of it (which will make you a google queen, which is not a bad thing to be at all).

If you need any help with this, just message me. I am always happy to help.

[Stella Mae]

Thank you, Sue! Good to get these instructions.

[Sue Lau]

Stella Mae wrote:
Thank you, Sue! Good to get these instructions.

Anytime!