Search by subdomain

[Guest Vlits]

As several people have noted, due to the short length of the "m/m" and "f/f" tags, you can't exclude them from a search. So if you wanted to use the search feature rather than just browsing through the het sub-domain (for instance), you generally end up with a pretty high percentage of slash. It's really annoying when you include -slash in the search and over half the results are in the Slash category.

A possible fix to this (not sure if it would be easier or not) would be to allow you to search by sub-domain instead of just domain (e.g. "Hary Potter- Het" rather than just "Harry potter").

[DemonGoddess]

What you're referring to is searching within categories in a subdomain. HP is its own subdomain, books is a subdomain, buffy is a subdomain, and so on.

Due to the size of the database itself, as well as the current search engine limitations, you CANNOT search for terms of less than 4 characters. Not only that, the current search engine limits results to no more than 200 per search.

As to what you're specifically looking FOR, if data is not entered to enable your search term, in the summary, you won't get a result anyway, no matter if you're using the current engine, or when we finally get the new one integrated in.

It would be helpful if I knew precisely what you're wanting to find, because then I can likely help you structure your search terms to work more effectively. On the other hand, there are instructions at the search page, to do exactly that.

The DOMAIN is adult-fanfiction.org. The SUBDOMAIN is hp.adult-fanfiction.org. Searches are done within a subdomain for the specifics. For example, if you were to search for hp related stuff in books, xmen, or any other subdomain but hp, you would find nothing at all.

[Vlits]

Sorry about the terminology mix-up, I was basing it off another topic where sub-domain was used to reference the het or slash category of a subdomain. I had been hoping it might not be too difficult to search a specific category of a subdomain, as it would solve most of my problems.

I know that no matter how good the search engine is, I'll miss out on stories I want (or as is more obvious at the moment, see stories I don't) because of a lack of information in the summary. Honestly, there are more stories that show with nothing indicating slash in the summary (besides the exact pairing, which is even then usually in the category/sub-category listing under the summary) than there are ones that have the "m/m" tag I can't omit from my results, but almost every single one would be removed from the results if I was able to specifically search in individual categories of the subdomains.

As for what I'm searching for, it's not anything specific, as there are a number of different things I end up searching for depending on what sort of story I'm looking for at the time. And I make use of the instructions on the search page quite thoroughly, but a lot of the time I'm looking for something a little more general than the instructions reference, but at the same time a little more specific than the search engine seems capable of (at least with regards to excluding certain things, mainly slash.

It's probably more effort than it's worth as a temporary fix considering a full revamp of the search engine is in the works, but I had hoped it might be a little easier to narrow the section of the database being searched than it most likely is.

(I'm the OP, but for some reason it had logged me out before I made the first post, and I didn't realize until I had already posted.)

[BronxWench]

Given the limitations of the Summary Field currently, many authors don't use the "m/m" or "m/f" tags in a subdomain where we have the categories available for "Het" or "Slash - Male/Male." It gives the authors that slight increase in size for the actual summary as opposed to it being no more than a list of tags.

As part of the code rewrite, it's my understanding that the tags will have a separate field, which should allow authors to write a clearer summary if they wish. This would make it easier to search by specific tags, if I'm not mistaken. I'm not a coder, however, so we'll have to see how it develops.