Orchid loving hacker willing to volunteer...

[Diane56Victor]

Hi

Happy to have my email on a list. Will send pm

[Dusty Ol' Man]

Have you ever tried to search for an old post on Facebook? Or reddit for that matter. This, as old as it is, is far superior.

[YetAnotherOrchidNut]

Originally Posted by Dusty Ol' Man

Have you ever tried to search for an old post on Facebook? Or reddit for that matter. This, as old as it is, is far superior.

That is setting the bar rather low isn't it. Google or other *search engines* are the proper comparison.

Facebook doesn't make money from being a source of information, it makes money from selling *mis*information. It makes money from tricking you into spending as much time as possible on their site and tricking you into giving them data about yourself that they can sell. They have no financial interest in making the information you want to find easy to find, on the contrary they make money by making it easy for advertisers to show you the information the advertiser or paying posters wants you to find.

If they provided good search features you would search, read, and leave, something that goes completely against their corporate goals. I guarantee you they have done experiments and analysis that shows that poor quality search results keep people on the site longer which is their primary success metric. they probably have ML solutions which are continually "optimising" their search results to keep people searching and looking at posts that you didn't actually want to see.

Google on the other hand is a very effective way to search this site. Their business is based on "answering the question". They are the ones you should be comparing against. Search is difficult. Doing it well requires a lot more than the kind of tech this site uses. Google does it exceptionally well.

[Dusty Ol' Man]

I'm not an internet guru. I read sites like this one. Or I search for things I want to buy. I ignore ads to a fault. And once I see clickbait I'm gone, never to return. I wouldn't know how to use Google to search this site if my life depended on it.

[YetAnotherOrchidNut]

Originally Posted by Dusty Ol' Man

I'm not an internet guru. I read sites like this one. Or I search for things I want to buy. I ignore ads to a fault. And once I see clickbait I'm gone, never to return. I wouldn't know how to use Google to search this site if my life depended on it.

It is simple. put "site:orchidboard.com" at the start of your search query. Use quotes around phrases.

Eg, I just searched for all the posts you have ever made or participated in that involve dendrobiums with this:

site:orchidboard.com dendrobium "Dusty Ol' Man"

Actually when I originally typed it in I made a typo on dendrobium and google detected it and showed me the correct results instead. There is no way this site would do that: in fact just the other day I tried to find posts by "herebutnot", but that is not the correct user name and there were no results, I needed to search for "here_butnot", but the site didnt tell me that like google would have, and it took me a while to realize that on this site his username has an underbar in it.

BTW, I am not a shill for Google. I happen to know them well because of previous work I have done, but I don't and didn't work for them.