[Kaitlyn S]

Hi - I specifically put this in General Bridge Discussion because the people who I am addressing probably don't read the forum where this post belongs.

Frequently I'll see some bridge discussion and I'll want to refer to a thread where either the same thing or something pertinent was discussed but it was long enough ago that I can't find it. A search for "two level response" or "negative double" is going to get thousands of hits (and besides the "two" in two level response is tossed in a BBF search for being less than four letters.)

Some threads on bidding are discussing an unusual auction. It would be really cool if the OP would put something at the bottom of his post that would make his post findable by that auction. For example:

SEARCH TERM 1D_2C_2D_2S_3H

You can't put spaces between the bids because all the search terms would be 2 characters and the search wouldn't happen. Also, since most auctions are done with the bidding diagrams, they aren't searchable.

I tried separating the bids with dashes, dots, equal signs, and exclamation points, but the search function doesn't find strings including those characters. So it appears that it has to be underscores (or a dummy letter - but the underscores are easier to see.)

I think it would be really difficult to do this for a play or defense problem, but in my experience, every time I have wanted to refer to an earlier thread, it has been a bidding problem. A thread that discusses several auctions could either have more than one search line or have as a search term the most interesting of those auctions. That being said, a recent defense thread that got a lot of discussion could be tagged with the auction which was very important to the auction:
SEARCH TERM 1D_1S_2C_2H_2NT_3C_3S_3NT By the way, I could see myself searching for that thread in six months. I'm going to edit my first post in that thread to find the search term.

While some might think we need to differentiate between constructive and competitive auctions, I don't really mind if 1D_1S_2D_2S finds me both hands where one side bid all those and hands where one side is bidding diamonds and the other spades - this will make it easy to put in the search terms.

Two additional suggestions:

1) Since the search function will not find the auction unless you have the entire string, I suggest leaving off the final pass.

For example, you won't find the above string by searching for 1D_1S_2C_2H. You need the whole string, so let's not make the searcher (or the poster) put in that final pass.

2) Since the string always has to be exact, use NT for notrump, X for double, and R for redouble.

It might be better to use a dummy letter instead to make the string findable by partial auctions? When I searched for "search term" I found everything with the word "search" in it, even my "searchable"! So it might work better to use a dummy letter (like z) instead of the underscore. It wouldn't be readable though. NO, THIS DOESN'T WORK EITHER. Apparently the numbers in the string make finds of part of the string not work.

[manudude03]

When you are using the BBO search function, you can use quotation marks (" ") to get around the character limit. It also wouldn't help searching if the hand is not about an auction.

[barmar]

When someone is doing a search, how often would they be searching for an exact auction like that?

BTW, although the forum's built-in search function has a minimum word length, Google doesn't. You can can do a google search that includes "site:www.bridgebase.com" to restrict the results to our site.

[The_Badger]

I tend to agree with Barry (barmar) above. I think the way forward perhaps - just a suggestion - is to ask posters to be a bit more specific in their titles. I am guilty as charged myself (as commentators have rightly pointed out to me in my post 'In The Absence of a Support Double').

That post should be named "Raising Responder's Major with Three Card Support". Technically it had nothing to do with a Support Double as a SD wasn't used. Yet I am sure most commentators understood what I was getting at but, at the end of the day, it wasn't correct. And I'll be more careful in the future.