The International Cessna^® 170 Association

Guess I need to be spoon fed. If I want to find all the posts regarding overhauling the fuel selector valve, what words should I put in which blanks under SEARCH?

In the line that says "Search for Keywords:" type in the subject.
Fewer words = less etraneous material. Type in " selector* " and you will get about 50 threads - - " selector valve " 200+ and if you put "fuel" in the line you get boookooo !

Usually the maintinence items are in the "Hangar" section so chose from the "FORUM's little drop down menu "Hangar. Hope this helps, Frank.

Just in case here are a couple of old threads

http://cessna170.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.p ... or+rebuild

http://www.cessna170.org/phpBB2/viewtop ... ctor+valve

http://www.cessna170.org/phpBB2/viewtop ... ctor+valve

I would start with "fuel and selector and valve". Using the "and" between words will insure that all of the words are included in the post. Then I would read through the posts that looked relevant. You might call it overhauling but someone else might call it rebuilding, so a search that included the word "overhauling" could miss a lot of information.

John's got it. The keywords in John's search sentence are the "and" word which in this case are called Boolean statements. If you wanted to search for all terms without typing the 'and" you can choose to do so by clicking the button under the search criteria window. "And", "Or" and "Not" are the relative Boolean statements used most often.

For example: "Fuel and selector and valve and overhaul or repair" will find all posts with the words fuel, selector, valve and overhaul or repair" just as you might suspect.

Now if you wanted to eliminate all the posts George is mentioned by name it would be : "Fuel and selector and valve and overhaul or repair not George".

There is also a wild card character which is the "*" This is used most often when you don't know how something is spelled. Searching for fuel by typing "f**l" with find all the posts with fuel and fool and any other 4 letter word beginning with "f" and ending in "l".

This is all pointed out just to the left of the search criteria window but of course that does no good it you don't know what it's talking about.

Another why to limit searches is to put in an author in the search criteria block. The trick here is you have to know the authors user name. Searching for all of George's post by typing in "george" won't fine much but "gahorn" will find plenty.

Boolean searches can be very useful other places as well like searching Ebay. Ever want to search for 170 parts. You type 170 and you also get all the King 170B ads.

Here are 3 of my favorite Ebay searches.

For 170 stuff: (170, 170a, 170b) -king -kx -nav
For Cubs stuff: (cub, j3, j-3) -video -dvd -dvds -manual -manuals
For continental stuff: continental -manual -video -manuals

The stuff in parenthesis is the same as having an "or" in between. The "-" is the same as "not". You can see I'm not interested in manual or manuals - you have to do it twice because the plural is a different word. I also don't want videos or DVDs.

The search function in PHPBB has its limitations. What I have found works best when you know something is in the forum but search just isn't helping you out is:

Google.

For a search on "fuel selector" type into the Google search field:
You can eliminate keywords that you don't want searched for too:
The Google thing works well for all forums, especially when some have a search function that has a 4-character keyword minimum. Bruce's examples will work the same in Google too. Sometimes Google just has better indexing and search algorithms.