Searching Mint Forums - A Better Way

[sausageandeggs]

There is also another way to search the forum easily with google if you use firefox.If you follow the instructions on http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches you can search the forum from your address bar.

How:
Bookmark forum hompage http://forums.linuxmint.com/
Edit the new bookmarks preferences, Give it a short keyword (i used m)
Edit the URL of bookmark adding " ?*=%s " (Where * is your keyword)
(So my URL with a keyword of "m" is " http://forums.linuxmint.com/?m=%s" )
Then to search the forum just type your keyword into the address bar followed by what your searching for. e.g i would type " m sound " into the address bar to search the forum for "sound"

Hope that makes sense!!

[altair4]

I'm having a couple of problems with your suggestion:

(1) The problem I was addressing in my original post related to deficiencies in the built in search facility of the forum itself. It often ignores certain keywords using some kind of algorithm that I don't quite understand. My solution was to use google's "site search" facility to work around these deficiencies. If I understand your post, you're using the forum search facility so the problem still exists.

(2) For the life of me I can't get it to work. I copy and pasted your example:
Location: "http://forums.linuxmint.com/?m=%s" <--- without the quotes
Keyword: m

Then I issued the following into the address bar: m automount fred
It brought me to the main page of the forum

I tried different variations, for example:
Location: "http://forums.linuxmint.com/search.php?m=%s"
That brought me to the "Advanced Search" page requireing me to input my search terms.

What am I doing wrong? Is there some setting in mozilla that needs to be changed to make this work?

[sausageandeggs]

Hi, I hadn't thought about your first point so it may still using the site search engine, i dont know, my results always show up on a google page though, and the url points to a google site search. I tried it with your search request "m automount fred" and it gave me this http://www.google.com/cse?q=automount+fred&cx=002683415331144861350%3Atsq8didf9x0&sitesearch=forums.linuxmint.com Don't know if thats the right results for you.(*Edit - I've just compared these results to the ones i get using the code from your OP and the results are nearly identical. So I think it is using google site search*)
As for why it wont work for you i don't know, I haven't changed anything in FF, the only thing i can suggest is to do it the long(ish) way and go to the forum home page and bookmark it and then edit the url adding ?"keyword"=%s and keyword, rather than copy paste.Thats how i did it (and have done it for a few sites now). The full "http://forums.linuxmint.com/?m=%s" link was acting strangely when i was writing the original post, i was trying to put the [url] brackets around it but it wouldn't show up as a link, i doubt thats affected anything but you never know.
Sorry i can't be of more help.

[altair4]

Fascinating. Well, the important things about your method is the cse and the cx=002683415331144861350 so the folks who run Mint are happy.

It is in fact doing a google "site search" as my method does.

It's a lot simpler.

I still have no idea why it doesn't work for me. In fact I don't even understand how it gets to google since there isn't even a reference to google in the bookmark.

I'll play with this later - must be something I'm overlooking