On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 08:30 PM, Zapple100 wrote:
Why is it so hard to find groups? Whatever I type in, nothing comes up.
Further to Frances's comment about potential target groups being publicly visible the success of any given search is based on (a) the group owner setting up their Group Description so that it contains a good selection of keywords relevant to their group's purpose and (b) the person carrying out a search making an intelligent guess about what those keywords might be.
In the case of (a) not all group owners set up their group descriptions in such a way that will make searching for them either easy or successful and in the case of (b) it may require some inventiveness to find the right search terms!
Searching for a particular group
name is always likely to be a bit hit and miss unless the relevant words are included in the description, which for understandable reasons they may well
not be.
As a general rule the more search terms you use the more likely is some measure of success; the search mechanism returns all instances of each individual term occurring in group descriptions; it does not rely on finding the terms in combination with one another.
I don't know what the limit on the number of search terms is, or the total number of characters allowed. I have tested the search mechanism with ten terms totalling 66 characters (including spaces) and it found them all in one group description; not surprising because I put them all there as a means of testing it!
Also note that the search in the singular will not find plurals; type in "house" and it will
not find "houses". It is possible to carry out wildcard searches by the use of *; type in house* and it
will find houses, but the downside is that it will also find housewife, housemaid, household, housefly and doubtless others as well.
Not so helpful...
Alternative nouns can also be useful; if looking some somthing relating to (say) dogs / cats / horses it is worth including canine / feline / equine and so on.
What sorts of groups are you looking for?
Chris
