Search Engine Tip

Just a reminder to everyone, please make sure to check the system to see if what you want to upload is already here. I have a suspicion that part of the problem may be that people are not using the site search engine correctly.

Often, if you search for an entire title, particularly when it contains words that are also in a lot of torrents that are already on the system, it will either return a huge list of possible matches, (in which case you might miss the title when you have to look through pages of results), or worse, sometimes it won't find something that is already here.

The best way to handle this is to use string literals in your search, ie., enclose the title in quotes. For example, if you were to do a search for the film Under Fire, it will return 50 possible matches, whilst if you search for "under fire" it will only return 7. sometimes, even that will shoot you in the foot, because there might be a typo, or punctuation mark, and if you string literal does not match it exactly, you still won't find a title that is on the system. Therefore to be thorough, also try just using a key word from the title, (if there is one), that is not likely to be commonly used, and enclose it in full quotes. For example, if you did a non-string literal search for the film Queen of Katwe, you would get a list of 44 possible titles including everything that contains the word queen, but if you just did a search for "katwe", then you would only get a list of just the one film in question.

Searching for anything that contains any kind of punctuation mark should be used with a great deal of care, because the uploader may, or may not, have included it in the title at the time of upload. If you did a search for threes company, you would find nothing, but if you searched for three's company, you would find the titles, as that is the way that the uploader entered them. In that circumstance, searching for just "company", or even "three" would find it regardless of whether there was an apostrophe in the title or not, (albeit with a bunch of other stuff that also contained the word company or three).

Of course, none of the above is going to help in the circumstance where people are just dumping torrents on the system without bothering to check for duplicates first, but it will most definitely help when people are actually taking the time to do the search, and getting false negatives because of the way that they did the search.