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And they say elephants never forget - Fort Wayne News SentinelThis has nothing to do with elephants. I suggest that you do something about the filter that dredges up anything with "elephant" in the text. The same applies to the item about "Elephant Loans", which is just the name of a financial services company.
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Better search expression
Mon, 2007-06-11 18:54 by Hans
The current search expression for the elephant news, using Google News search, is:
elephant OR elephants
Can anybody think of a better search expression that is not too restrictive?
Hans
Excluders?
Tue, 2007-06-12 09:43 by hcroze
I'd be surprised if the criteria expression did not allow the standard kinds of SQL excluder symbols or phrases that the Google search engine allows. For example, you can use the minus sign (or a NOT, I seem to remember) to exclude items from the search:
(elephant OR elephants) AND -seal
will get you stuff on elephants but not elephant seals. I may not have the syntax quite right, but it's something like that. Hans, would this work:
(elephant OR elephants) AND -(seal OR loan).
BTW, you don't need to put in the plural, since 'elephant' will also get you 'elephants', right?
And to prove the point
Thu, 2007-06-14 13:05 by hcroze
And to prove the point (again) how we need to restrict the search, see the particularly boring and irrelevant new article that just popped up: New timetable set for Elephant and Castle developer selection
HC
Trouble is,
Fri, 2007-06-15 10:24 by Hans
that (elephant OR elephants) AND -(seal OR loan) wouldn't have blocked that article.
In my experience it is difficult to find a really good search expression and that you will always have some false hits.
Still exclusions are a very good idea. I'll try to use such an expression. Then we can see how effective it is. Please give me a little time until end of June.
Hans
Doesn't seem to work
Mon, 2007-06-25 09:51 by Hans
The problem with exclusions is that the list of words to be excluded is endless. And the more you put in, the higher the likelihood that you're excluding something you don't really want to exclude.
But if we had a frequently recurring case, we could make a specific exclusion for that.
Hans