The Askingbox Search

On the site askingbox.com/search you can find a search function making it possible to search all contributions published on askingbox.com according to your individual search criteria. In this info I would like to introduce you to the individual functions of the search.

Search Term

In the box "search term" you can specify one or more search words, you want to search for. If you specify only some words, topics containing all of these words will be found. Otherwise, you can also use the special characters minus (-), asterisk (*) and double quote (")  to specify your search in more detail. The following examples illustrate this.

• Search for  'computer internet': Finds topics containing both words "computer" and "internet".
• Search for  'computer -internet': Finds topics containing the word "computer" but not the word "internet". All topics containing the word "internet" will be excluded from the results.
• Search for  'computer*': Finds all topics containing words beginning with "computer", for example "computercable", "computers", "computerequipment" and so on.
• Search for  ' "computer internet" ': Finds all topics containing the words "computer" and "internet" in exactly this order. All search terms surrounded with double quotes have to be part of the text in exactly this way.
• Search for  ' "computer internet" -mouse': Finds all topics containing "computer internet" in exactly this order but not the word "mouse".

Please note: The Askingbox Search is not case-sensitive. Searching for "Computer" will cause the same results like searching for "computer" or "CoMpuTEr". The search words have to appear in the headline, the article or the comments. In addition, the search function is not searching for words with a length of 1 or 2 characters and words with a length of 3 characters will only be searched for in the headline of the contribution.

Type

Here you can limit your search to a specific type of topic. For example, with this you can search only for questions, only for articles, only for lists or only for certain groups of types like "Tips and Tutorials" or "Infos and Articles". If you would like to search for all types of contributions, simply select "All Topics" here.

Status

Each topic on askingbox.com has a certain status. This can either be "answered" or "unanwered". If you wish to search for topics of a particular status, you can specify it in the status box, otherwise you can select "All Topics" to search independently from the status. Please note that only questions, votings and discussions can be "unanswered". Tutorials, articles and so on are automatically "answered".

Category

Using the search option "category" can limit the search to one category. In doing so, you can select both a top category such as "Computer and Internet" as well as any sub category like "Databases" or "Software". When choosing a main category, also the topics of all sub categories of this top category will be found. So, while a search in the top category "Computer and Internet" will also find all contributions of the sub categories "Databases", "Software" and so on, a search for contributions in the category "Software" will only find posts in the category "Software" or sub categories of "Software". Select "All Categories" to search in all kinds of categories.