SearchTipsByMike

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WHAT'S THIS ABOUT?

One of the big problems the Gnutella network had was that it was sometimes impossible to do a search for exactly what you wanted. If you typed a name or title like your eyes, it would give you matches for both words. So you'd get hundreds of hits for things you did not want.

Web search engines on the other hand didn't have this problem, because you could search for phrases. For example, "your eyes" -- and the search results would have to have that actual phrase in them, not just the two words.

THE SEARCHING TIP

Well, the Gnutella2 network supports searching for phrases too! It's now possible to do a search for "your eyes" and get only results which have your eyes in them.

WHAT ELSE?

There's more. Normally any words or phrases you type are considered "required", i.e. matching files must have them. You can reverse this and exclude certain words or phrases by prefixing them with a minus (-) character. For example searching for dog -food would find files which have dog but not food. It works with phrases too, for example searching for your eyes -"your eyes" would find files that have the words your and eyes in them, but don't have the phrase your eyes. (for example, those eyes of yours)

IS THERE MORE?

Yes there is. When doing advanced searches, you get to type in what you want for each field, like title, bitrate, length, etc. These allow you to be more specific, for example if you want to find me in the title and you in the artist name.

If you're entering something for a numeric field like bitrate or time, searching for an exact value is probably not going to be that great an idea. It's more useful to search for a minimum or maximum value. You can do this!

If you want to find files with a bitrate of 192k or above, enter 192- in the bitrate field. Note the dash on the end means "and above". If you want 256k or below, use -256. If you want anything from 192 to 256, use 192-256. Obviously in numeric fields, the dash (-) is used for ranges, rather than for excluding things!

This is good for lengths in seconds (time), lengths in minutes (minutes), bitrates in kbps (bitrate), and frequencies in hertz (sampleRate). Now you can find all media files over 8 minutes long at 192 kbps or higher!

HOW WIDELY IS THIS SUPPORTED?

Well, this stuff is all Gnutella2 only. The Gnutella network does not have the necessary routing logic to properly handle these kinds of queries, and non-Shareaza programs probably would not understand them. Earlier Shareazas (1.6 and below) will understand the numeric range searches, but that's about it.

So, if you do one of these things and find that you are still getting results which don't match from Gnutella clients, that could be the reason!

I think this is a sorely needed search improvement, and I'm very excited about it. I hope it will come in handy.