Infinite Jest
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- May 9, 2000
- Messages
- 24,398
A quick guide to searching Bluelight
Bluelight Basic Search
Bluelight has a built-in search engine. The basic search can be accessed through the search link in the top right of each page. To use the basic search, just enter some search terms in the drop-down box will search the entire site. This is quick and easy, but will probably return too many results (you are searching the entire text of each thread on the board).
No matter how many hits you get on your search term, Bluelight will only display 500 results. This is especially relevant if you search for a word that is used a lot on BL, like ecstasy or drugs.
Why do we only display 500 results? Because searching puts a load on the server, limiting results is necessary. (In the bad old days, we had to tell people not to search, because it slowed the whole board for everyone).
Results are sorted by date, with the most recent ones first - not necessarily the most relevant.
In earlier versions of the search engine, it would not recognise any search term with fewer than four characters - so to search for LSD you had to type LSD* . This seems to have been fixed, and you can now search for LSD or other three letter terms. Two letter search terms like NZ don't seem to work, though. And typing *xx* doesn't work, though xx* will.
The search defaults to AND: e.g.
goat monkey finds any threads with both of the words goat and monkey anywhere in the thread.
You can specify a search for one or more words using OR:
goat OR monkey finds any thread with either the word goat or the word monkey
Using quote marks will search for an exact phrase:
"goat monkey" will find nothing except those exact words, in that exact order.
"Infinite Jest is a" will find threads containing the phrase "Infinite Jest is a Kiwi", "Infinite Jest is a fucktard", "Infinite Jest is a dick", "Infinite Jest is a librarian", etc.
You can use an asterisk as a wildcard to match letters:
e.g. typing ecstas* will match ecstasy;
blueligh* will match bluelight, bluelighter, bluelighters, bluelight's
Bluelight Advanced Search
Advanced search is similar but offers you options to target your search: you can specify to search whole threads, or just the thread title. You can limit your search to threads with a certain number of replies. You can limit your search to recent threads. You can sort your results by date, by thread length, by relevancy or by title.
You can also search for posts by user name, or limit your search to a particular forum. This is a very effective way of narrowing your search to the most useful posts.
Searching Bluelight using internet search engines:
The same sort of principles apply to all search engines, so I won't go through them all one by one.
You can use search engines to search just one site, in this case Bluelight. Use the "site:x" syntax, plus your search query.
For example: In Google, site:bluelight.ru Infinite Jest should find all mentions of my name, including all the posts I've made. Google not being perfect, however, it doesn't - it misses several thousand posts. Possibly that's because my old posts have been deleted, but be aware that Google will probably not find everything on the board. Also, Google only displays the first 1000 results, no matter how many hits you get.
Finally, be aware that the results will be in an order that is almost random, compared to the relevance ranked results that you get when you search the whole web.
This is because Google ranks websites by how many other sites link to them. So if you do a search on the whole web for MDMA, the top result is Wikipedia, because a lot of other sites link to that page. MDMA.net and Erowid are also highly ranked. But searching within a site like Bluelight doesn't work so well, because there are very few weblinks to individual threads, to help Google determine which threads should be highly ranked. So basically your results will be quite random, although you can expect FAQs, which get linked to reasonably often, to be higher ranked.
In Yahoo!, AlltheWeb and Altavista use the same syntax: site:bluelight.ru Infinite JestIn Ask and Microsoft Live, this feature works very badly, so don't bother.
Note that each engine gives different results - different numbers of hits, and not all hits overlap between engines. If you're really looking for something specific and can't find it with one engine, try one of the other ones.
Google Co-op Search:
This is a custom search engine that searches sites related to harm reduction, including Bluelight, Erowid, Dancesafe, and over a dozen more. The engine was created by Bluelight's Digital Duality. It's a good way of getting information from a number of sites at once, and avoiding the misinformation you might find from sites like the Scientologist anti-drug site (which ranks high on many search engines). However, it doesn't search the sites as deeply as the regular Google site search that I explained above. You can now find links to this search box at the top of most forums, or click here.
Firefox Search Plugin
Firefox Users: search BL, journal, galleries with the Firefox Search Plugin (click for how-to guide).
Bluelight Basic Search
Bluelight has a built-in search engine. The basic search can be accessed through the search link in the top right of each page. To use the basic search, just enter some search terms in the drop-down box will search the entire site. This is quick and easy, but will probably return too many results (you are searching the entire text of each thread on the board).
No matter how many hits you get on your search term, Bluelight will only display 500 results. This is especially relevant if you search for a word that is used a lot on BL, like ecstasy or drugs.
Why do we only display 500 results? Because searching puts a load on the server, limiting results is necessary. (In the bad old days, we had to tell people not to search, because it slowed the whole board for everyone).
Results are sorted by date, with the most recent ones first - not necessarily the most relevant.
In earlier versions of the search engine, it would not recognise any search term with fewer than four characters - so to search for LSD you had to type LSD* . This seems to have been fixed, and you can now search for LSD or other three letter terms. Two letter search terms like NZ don't seem to work, though. And typing *xx* doesn't work, though xx* will.
The search defaults to AND: e.g.
goat monkey finds any threads with both of the words goat and monkey anywhere in the thread.
You can specify a search for one or more words using OR:
goat OR monkey finds any thread with either the word goat or the word monkey
Using quote marks will search for an exact phrase:
"goat monkey" will find nothing except those exact words, in that exact order.
"Infinite Jest is a" will find threads containing the phrase "Infinite Jest is a Kiwi", "Infinite Jest is a fucktard", "Infinite Jest is a dick", "Infinite Jest is a librarian", etc.
You can use an asterisk as a wildcard to match letters:
e.g. typing ecstas* will match ecstasy;
blueligh* will match bluelight, bluelighter, bluelighters, bluelight's
Bluelight Advanced Search
Advanced search is similar but offers you options to target your search: you can specify to search whole threads, or just the thread title. You can limit your search to threads with a certain number of replies. You can limit your search to recent threads. You can sort your results by date, by thread length, by relevancy or by title.
You can also search for posts by user name, or limit your search to a particular forum. This is a very effective way of narrowing your search to the most useful posts.
Searching Bluelight using internet search engines:
The same sort of principles apply to all search engines, so I won't go through them all one by one.
You can use search engines to search just one site, in this case Bluelight. Use the "site:x" syntax, plus your search query.
For example: In Google, site:bluelight.ru Infinite Jest should find all mentions of my name, including all the posts I've made. Google not being perfect, however, it doesn't - it misses several thousand posts. Possibly that's because my old posts have been deleted, but be aware that Google will probably not find everything on the board. Also, Google only displays the first 1000 results, no matter how many hits you get.
Finally, be aware that the results will be in an order that is almost random, compared to the relevance ranked results that you get when you search the whole web.
This is because Google ranks websites by how many other sites link to them. So if you do a search on the whole web for MDMA, the top result is Wikipedia, because a lot of other sites link to that page. MDMA.net and Erowid are also highly ranked. But searching within a site like Bluelight doesn't work so well, because there are very few weblinks to individual threads, to help Google determine which threads should be highly ranked. So basically your results will be quite random, although you can expect FAQs, which get linked to reasonably often, to be higher ranked.
In Yahoo!, AlltheWeb and Altavista use the same syntax: site:bluelight.ru Infinite JestIn Ask and Microsoft Live, this feature works very badly, so don't bother.
Note that each engine gives different results - different numbers of hits, and not all hits overlap between engines. If you're really looking for something specific and can't find it with one engine, try one of the other ones.
Google Co-op Search:
This is a custom search engine that searches sites related to harm reduction, including Bluelight, Erowid, Dancesafe, and over a dozen more. The engine was created by Bluelight's Digital Duality. It's a good way of getting information from a number of sites at once, and avoiding the misinformation you might find from sites like the Scientologist anti-drug site (which ranks high on many search engines). However, it doesn't search the sites as deeply as the regular Google site search that I explained above. You can now find links to this search box at the top of most forums, or click here.
Firefox Search Plugin
Firefox Users: search BL, journal, galleries with the Firefox Search Plugin (click for how-to guide).