Joined Sep 2013
peekaboo!
Forum Thread
Writing Advanced Keywords
March 2, 2024 at
06:11 PM
Does SD have a comprehensive guide on how to write advanced search keywords. For example, if I wanted to search for just NVME, and want to exclude the multitude of desktop/laptop posts that have that keyword in them, how do I do that? I tried excluding laptops by model name (e.g. -thinkpad -ideapad...) but as you can imagine that's a losing proposition. Soon the search string exceeds its character limit. TIA
About the OP
5 Comments
Your comment cannot be blank.
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
Couple suggestions:
Maybe one of the better options would be to have the deal alert look only in the title of the thread. By default, deal alerts look in both the title AND the body of the OP's post, to match the deal alert keyword string. It would still get you some false positives, but not all desktop/laptop deals mention NVMe in the title, it's usually more in the body of the post. And most of the NVMe deals do say it in title I think, though sadly not all. (I did a test search for just NVMe in title vs in both title and post. The in title only test showed 5,453 results over the years with a few laptop/desktop deals sprinkled in the results. And the in both title and OP's post test showed 14,245 results over the years and had a lot more laptop/desktop deals in that batch.)
Granted that option will also miss some deals, if the OP just says something like 2TB Samsung 990 Evo in the title, but doesn't say NVMe too, but it will get you fewer false positives.
To have it look for NVMe in the title only, just do this for your keyword:
@title NVMe
You can add other words to that if you want to refine it more later, but I'd try just that first and see how good or bad it works for you.
-------
Another option is if you already have a keyword string with all the models in it that you could put before you hit the character limit, try changing -thinkpad -ideapad etc to this instead to save a little character space:
-(thinkpad|ideapad) with just one - in front of the keywords in the parenthesis and just a pipe symbol | between the model names.
So like:
NVMe -(thinkpad|ideapad|inspiron|legion). Using the parenthesis and the | pipe symbol means you don't have to do a -thinkpad -ideapad -inspiron -legion type string, and it'll use a *little* less character space if it's a long string (though not as useful on smaller strings, character space wise).
Keep in mind that if you're using a phrase in between the | pipe symbols, the words in the phrase itself must be in quotes to make it an exact phrase so that the deal alert treats that phrase as one single word. (example WD|"Western Digital" will look for either WD or Western Digital only. But if you do WD|Western Digital without the quotes by accident instead, it would look for WD AND digital OR also WD AND Western too)
----
If you're looking mostly for certain brand name NVMes, you can try adding those brands to the NVMe keyword, such as:
NVMe Samsung|WD|"Western Digital"|Crucial|Kingston|PNY, so that it only matches if both NVMe AND ALSO at least one of the other keywords options in your string are both in the post. So deal for a Lenovo laptop with an NVMe SSD won't match if it doesn't also say it's a Samsung NVMe for example, so that one wouldn't trigger an alert for that keyword string.
If none of that helps, you can quote me or acesmuzic in reply here and we'll try again
Edit: If it helps, here is the original SD Deal Alert FAQ page that went missing some years ago from SD itself. But the Wayback Machine has a copy. Give it a minute to load and it'll drop you right to the deal alert section
...
Hey widgit! Thank you such a detailed response. It really helps! I'll give your suggestions a try over the next couple of days, and get back to you with an update.