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Search options

While searching on a Codidact site, you have several options to help refine your search and make it easier to find what you're looking for. Searching will search all posts across that site, including Questions, Answers, Meta posts, and whatever other post types your site may have.

Basic keyword searching

Let's say you want to search for the term snake oil. You have a few basic options:

• plain search

  If you put the text snake oil into the searchbox, Codidact will find all posts that contain either the word snake or oil.

• exact search (quote marks)

  If you include quote marks around your search term, such as "snake oil", Codidact will find all posts that contain exactly the phrase snake oil.

• keyword search (plus symbol)

  If you search for +snake +oil, Codidact will find all posts that contain both the words snake and oil.

• excluding words (minus symbol)

  If you want to search for snake but exclude the word oil from your results, you can do a search for snake -oil. Codidact will find posts that contain the word snake but do not have the word oil.

Filtering by score and age

It's possible to filter your search to only include results that have been posted within a certain timeframe, or match certain score requirements.

You can use >, >=, <, and <= with these options to search for ranges. By default, a value without an operator looks for an exact match. For example, upvotes:4 searches for exactly 4; upvotes:>=4 searches for at least 4.

• filtering by post score

  Codidact uses Wilson scoring to help in sorting posts. (To learn more about how this works, see /help/scoring for a detailed explanation.) Every post has a score between 0.0 and 1.0. To use this in search, you can use score:>=0.5 to filter your search to only include posts with a score of at least 0.5.

• filtering by votes

  If you want to filter by the raw votes that a post has, you can use votes:5 to find posts where the net votes (upvotes minus downvotes) of a post equals 5 or votes:>=5 for votes of 5 or more.

• filtering by upvotes and downvotes

  If you search for upvotes:4, Codidact will find posts that have received exactly 4 upvotes, irrespective of how many downvotes the post has. Likewise, if you search for downvotes:4, Codidact will find posts that have received exactly 4 downvotes without taking upvotes into consideration. downvotes:<4 will find posts that have received fewer than four downvotes total).

• filtering by number of answers

  If you want to find posts with n answers, use answers:n. This is particularly helpful to find unanswered questions: answers:0. answers:<5 shows posts with fewer than five answers.

• filtering by creation date

  If you want to only find posts that have been written within a certain timeframe, you can use the created: search operator. created:<1w will find all posts created less than a week ago, where created:>1w will find only posts older than a week. You can use m for minute, h for hour, d for day, w for week, mo for month, and y for year.

Filtering by tag, user, category, or post type

• filtering by tag

  To filter for all posts with the tag snake, use the tag:snake operator. To exclude all posts with the tag oil, use -tag:oil.

• filtering by user

  If you want to search for posts written by a particular user you will need to know their unique user number for the community. This can be found by looking at their profile URL. You can then use user:xxxx where xxxx is the unique user number you are interested in.

• filtering by category

  To filter by category, you will need to know the unique numeric ID for that category. This can be found by looking at the URL shown when you click to view all posts in a particular category. Use the formatting category:xxxx to apply this filter.

• filtering by post type

  If you want to restrict your search to a particular post type, type post_type: into the search bar, and a dropdown menu should show the available post types to search. Note that not all communities may use all post types.

Advanced

• wildcard

  If you search with an asterisk (*) at the end of a word, such as snake*, Codidact will find all posts that contain words beginning with the letters snake, including words such as snakeskin. (This does not work at the beginning of a word; only the end.)

• results for either one of two words

  Searching with parentheses will allow you to search for a keyword, and either one of two other words. For instance, +oil +(snake palm) will find posts that contain the word oil and either the word palm or snake.

• weighting keywords

  When searching with multiple keywords, you can weigh different keywords separately. Using a tilde before a word will lower that word's weight, and have Codidact sort results with that keyword more towards the back. For instance, +snake ~oil will find all posts that contain the word snake, but rank the results that also contain the word oil lower.

  If you're searching with parentheses, you can rank words within those parentheses differently. +snake +(>skin <oil) will find all posts that contain snake and either skin or oil, but will rank results that contain skin higher than the results that contain oil.