Searching Nearby Posts

[jimerb]

I subscribe to the internet search option and it would be nice if I could search in the proximity of a specific post.

For example, sometimes I come across good posts that have no rhyme or reason in the filename and the poster name is complete gobbledygook. For example, the post might look like this:

FILENAME: Good file.jpg POSTER: "IWHsamXFdi2gAZ" <WmxiNMcreidTwc@VIM2ELqYyeo.zFN>

I sometimes have a hunch that there are a "set" of similar files, but I have no easy way to retrieve them via search without trying to download a million headers and locate it by date.

It would be nice if i could right click on the post and say "Search For Nearby Posts...". From there a dialog box could ask me how much time or records I want to pull FROM THAT GROUP.

Maybe the dialog looks like this: (Pretend the o's are radio buttons)

o - NUMBER OF RECORDS TO PULL _____
o - TIME TO PULL -- ___ HOURS

[SEARCH]

I would think this is possible using a message or post id?

Hope you will consider.

[jimerb]

Is there any way to do a search like this now?

[Quade]

You can search back to a specific age but you can't bracket the age. Meaning while you can say "Newer than N days", you can't do a "between X and Y days".

I'm talking about search here. Loading a group, you can define an age range with "Load Special".

[jimerb]

How about searching by date on the search service? That seems indexed to me, no?

The problem is that when i want to look for a post that is 200 days old i have to download like 300,000,000 headers (no joke.) It takes forever.

That seems untenable.

I mostly use your search service but don't know of any way to search for a post id or date range?

Many posters post gobbledygook for subject line and poster name. like:

File 1 Subject: Some cool file.avi {1/20]
poster: 049r504wfjlsjaflsdfjsdj@aslfjsdlfjlsdfj.com

File 2 Subject: Another interesting file.avi [2/20]
Poster: sdlfjalfjdlajldfj@ldfjasdlfjlsdfj.com

Each post in the set has a different email address.

There's nothing for me to key on.

Welcome any suggestions.

[Quade]

If the Newsbin search engine can figure out what they are, a real name gets listed for them. On the other hand if they're just random, there is no way to search for them.

You're trying to use the search engine like you used headers. It's not really built for it. You can set the oldest date, you can specify which groups to look in. There's no mechanism to "show all posts between age X and Y". It's not impossible to do but there's no mechanism to do it now. I'll mention this to Dex and see what he thinks. We've considered "Search instead of header downloads" but haven't moved forward with it.

[jimerb]

Sweet! That would be super helpful. I see more and more posters anonymizing their posts and not naming the subjects well, making it very hard to find using the search tool.


Most fields are already on the search bar. You would just need a way to not have to search text but rather to and from dates.

Hope that makes sense.

Thanks for considering this.