swfchan: .net-Search

Searching on swfchan.net

Use the search field at the top of the page to search among the archived threads. Note: Press the thin button to the right of the field!

Searching is done on words in a thread. The system was not built to support searching after sentences or words that appear in a certain order. Although searching for a sentence may work sometimes it is not reliable at all, if it works it is pure coincidence.

If you are going to search for a file name (or a file size) it is recommended that you use the search engine on swfchan.com instead since it is much more suited for that purpose.

Making a search

Searching is simple: You can specify words that must be in a thread, or words that must not be in a thread.

Type your words after each other with a space to separate each word. The order of the words doesn't matter.

If you place "-" in front of a word you make that word into a excluding word, the results you get back won't contain that word.

Words that do not have "-" in front of them are including words, the results you get back will contain them.

Tip: Use a space between words that normally are put together to maximize your results.

The underscore character

Normally a word you specify can be part of another word. If you wish to search for a whole word you have to put "_" in front of it and behind it.

Putting "_" only at the beginning of a word tells the system that the word is the beginning of a longer word (or same-length word), putting "_" at the back of it tells the system it is the end of a word.

"_" represents a space. It is supposed to be used to signal the beginning or the end of a word, but you can also put it inside of a word if you like to to search for two words next to each other (a sentence). However reliable sentence-searching is not supported by the system and all results you get back you got purely by luck. So avoid doing this.

Limitations and optimizations

Certain characters cannot be searched for in the system, such as "-" and "." ("-" is used to exclude words from your results). These will be stripped away from your search automatically. This mostly is in order to give more results for the same searched words, for example thanks to this the word "suchas" will find threads that has both "suchas" and "such-as" in them.

Duplicate characters next to each other have been discarded, both to save space and to make it easier to find results, searching for "lol" will find both "lloooooll" and "lol".

A few too common occurrences have also been discarded from searching, for example the hours of a day ("10:07"). Dates and post numbers are however still searchable.

Extremely large threads won't be 100% searchable, there is a limit to how many words a thread can have indexed. However these threads often have around 500 posts or more, there are very few of these in the archive. Besides they will still be searchable all the way up to the maximum word limit so they show up in the results most of the time if they are relevant.

There can be max 12 words in a search and a word can be max 25 characters long. All Unicode characters (like Japanese/Chinese kanji) are supported and can be searched.

Post Count Range

You can require threads to have a certain post count in order to be searched, this is done by adding "p#-#" to your query.

For example "p5-10" will limit the results to only show threads with between 5 and 10 posts (inclusive). You still need to search for a word like normal though. However if you search for something that all threads have, like the letter "a", you can use the post count range to just find any thread with a specific range of posts. Or why not just search for -XXX, where XXX are some random letters that you know no thread has.

Queue system

Since thread-searching is quite heavy compared to plain file name/size searching I've implemented a queue system. When you make a search it is saved and picked up by a external process on the server. After it has dealt with your query the results are cached for 2 hours and it deals with the next queued search.

When you refresh the page after a search the cache is checked, if your search results are in there they are restored and shown to you. Thanks to the cache the results can be seen immediately by other people that makes the same search as you did without their search having to go through the queue.

Search examples

"hello there"
Will find: there you are, hello
Won't find: here i am, bye

"hello _there_"
Will find: whyhellofriend, like it over there?
Won't find: hello you say, therefore i say hi

"what -is wrong"
Will find: what are you doing, you're wrong
Won't find: what is that, i'm wrong

"_i am right_"
Will find: nonamature insect to the topright!
Won't find: i am righthanded

Quickview

For each result a link that looks like ">>" is displayed at the end of the gray preview text. If you click it a quickview of the thread will be loaded -- that is an iframe will appear below the preview and the thread will be loaded into it. The iframe will automatically scroll down to show the screenshots of the discovered flash files in the thread and the beginning of the thread text.

Once a ">>" link has been clicked you can thereafter just click the preview text to open a quickview of the thread.

Above the quickview iframe to the right there are two purple option links. These allow you to toggle autofocus and singlemode on/off. When autofocus is on (default) the quickview iframe will be positioned at the top of the browser window when it is being opened. When singlemode is on (not default) all past quickviews will be closed when a new one is opened.

Below the quickview iframe to the right there are two links that allow you to open a quickview for the next and previous search result.

When a quickview is closed it is in reality only hidden, if opened again it will simply just be un-hidden (thus not required to be reloaded).

The quickview feature requires JavaScript to function and will not appear if it is disabled in your browser.