Advanced Searching

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Google provides an Advanced Search page for Groups as it does for its other indexes. And, as with the others, it offers a user-friendly way to employ search operator functions without knowing the operators. As you can see in Figure 4-15, the Advanced Groups Search page looks very much like the other advanced pages. The Find messages section works just as it does with a Web search (see Chapter 2). Use the four keyword boxes in this section in combination, forcing Google to treat your keywords in certain ways.

Figure 4-15: The Advanced Groups Search page resembles Google’s other advanced search pages, but with features unique to Groups.

The Advanced Groups Search page also includes the following search parameters exclusive to Google Groups:

• Newsgroup: Use this box to specify a particular newsgroup for searching, or even part of a newsgroup name. Feel free to include the asterisk if you don’t know the entire name. This feature replaces using the group operator.

• Subject: Use this box for keywords that you want to appear in the thread title. This feature replaces using the intitle and allintitle operators.

• Author: Use this box to specify an author’s screen name or e-mail address. In the latter case, this feature replaces using the author operator. Using the author operator with a screen name yields uneven results, which this advanced search page works out through fancy operator syntax.

• Message ID: This rarely used feature searches for a Usenet message ID, which you can glean from a message header.

• Language: Usenet is international, just like the Web. Use the drop-down menu to specify a language.

• Message dates: This is da bomb. Here’s where the advanced action is in Google Groups. The Groups archive is precisely historical in a way that the Web index can’t be because each one of the 800 million catalogued Usenet posts is stamped with a date and time. Use these drop-down menus to specify a date range for your search. Google Groups stretches back to 1981, though not all newsgroups are that old. This feature does not replace a search operator that can be typed into a keyword box. However, very handily, Google drags the drop-down menus over to the search results page (see Figure 4-16), so you can adjust the date range without returning to the Advanced Groups Search page.

  
  Figure 4-16: The specified date range appears atop the search results page, allowing adjustments on the fly.

• SafeSearch: This feature applies the same content filter as in Web searches. (See Chapter 2.)

  Remember 

  You can throw a Web search into Google Groups by clicking the Groups tab above any Web search results list. It’s a quick way to siphon the information flow in a new direction.

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