Help for the PorscheFans Archive Search Form

NOTICE:

Charlie Kindel (and www.kindel.com) is in no way officially associated with the real PorscheFans website and mailing lists. The information found here is provided as a public service. I have no control over the PorscheFans mailing lists.

The search page is setup so that you can enter your query (e.g. "valve noise") and pick the list(s) you want to restrict your search to. When you press the "Execute" button your query is sent to the server which processes it and builds a list of matching messages from the PorscheFans mailing list. The list of matching messages shows you graphically how likely it is that the message contains a match and allows you to view the hits in any of three ways.

The three ways you can view the hits are: Summary, Full, and Message:

Summary	Gives you a few lines of text around each hit. Each hit is highlighted.
Full	Full gives you the full text, but still highlights the hits.
Message	This gives you the full text of the message that contains your hits. The hits are not highlighted. To view the message this way, click on the filename link.

How To Forumlate Queries

First, understand that the technology underlying this PorscheFan Archive Search engine is a content indexing system called the Microsoft Index Server (Index Server should really be named Index Service because it is not a standalone product; it is a feature of Windows NT). The Index Server running on kindel.com regularly scans all of the message archives and generates a master index. When you enter a query the web server calls upon Index Server to search the index (and in some cases, using special commands, the actual messages themselves) for all messages that match the query.

At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your query to give you more complete results. These tips will get you started with basic query language and acquaint you with the full power of Microsoft Index Server. The examples given are Porsche specific to make it all more concrete for you.

Consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in the same order within a matching document.
Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.
You can search for any word except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search.
Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. For example, if you searched for "water in oil", the results could give you "air-water-and-oil" and "water in oil", because in is a noise word and appears in the exception list.
Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (").
To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, "World-Wide Web or ""Web""" searches for World-Wide Web or "Web".
Use property specifiers to find text in message headers. The property headers supported are @to, @from, @cc, @subject, @replyto, @date, and @organization. For example to find all messages sent by someone belonging to an organization that has the word Porsche in the organization name, write the following query:
@organization porsche

Note that not everyone includes an organization name in their email header. To search for all messages sent by Ferry Porsche, write the following query:
@from "Ferry Porsche"

or

@from "ferry@porsche.com"

Note that the above email address is totally fictional! A more realistic example would be looking for messages from Bruce Anderson:

@from "brucepor@aol.com"
Look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query form type valve* to find valve, valves, valveguide, and so on.
Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type sink** to find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.
Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, carrera and valve and carrera near valve, look for the words carrera and valve on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.
Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of carrera near the word price but not for sale, write the following query:

carrera near price AND NOT for sale
Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:
tire OR tyre

This query finds all pages that mention tire or tyre or both.
Put quotation marks around keywords if you want Index Server to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following query:

"carrera near valve"
Index Server will literally look for the complete phrase carrera near valve. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks:

carrera near valve
Index Server searches all documents for the words carrera and valve.
Use Free Text Queries if you want to enter queries using natural language. Index Server will examine your query, extract nouns and noun phrases and construct a query for you. With free text queries you can enter any text you want, from a proper question, to a string of words and phrases, without worrying about the query language. For example, if you type in the following query:

"How do I change my oil?"
Index Server will create a query for you automatically and begin the search. Note that when you're using free text queries, the regular query language features are disabled and keywords such as AND, OR, andNEAR are interpreted as normal words.

Note that this feature is only partially useful when used against the PorscheFans archives. If you don't get any hits, try different variations of the question. For example I found that "How do I change the oil on a 911?" resulted in no hits.