General: Effectively using velospace's search feature.

As we all know, there are know shortage of duplicate threads on these forums, all of which could have easily been avoided had the original poster taken the effort to utilize the search feature. Don't worry about reviving old threads folks, if your question is relevant and isn't already answered in a related thread, revive it!

velospace's search feature is driven by google, and as a result shares the same benefits and advanced features that normal google searches provide. A fantastic feature that I use on pretty much every search is the ability to emphasize or negate search terms with plus and minus signs respectively.

With most standard searches, you'll find that your results contain a mixture of bicycle profiles, profile comments, and forum posts. If you're only concerned with one of these features, you can isolate them using plus and minus signs. If I want to search only forum discussions, I simply add '+discussion' (no quotes) to the end of my search term.

For example:

foo +discussion

This will search all of velospace for documents containing the word 'foo', then filter those results down to documents that contain 'discussion'. Since this isn't a common term in profiles or comments, and since the URL for forum posts contains 'discussion', chances are your results will only be forum posts that are relevant to 'foo'.

Another example that uses both emphasis and negation would be if you were searching for all instances of profiles for iro angus's that are equipped with sugino 75's. This could be accomplished with:

iro angus +"sugino 75" +node -discussion

The minus sign would cause all documents containing discussion to be filtered out, while emphasizing on documents containing node (see URL for bike profiles), that might contain the separate terms iro, angus, accompanied by the literal term "sugino 75".

You can apply these same techniques to google, which comes in useful for all occasions. Of course google has a much better write up than this one, which you can find here if you're interested.