How do I search discussion pages on the Post-Dispatch website?

May 26, 2011 4:18 PM

How can I search for a particular user's comments in response to articles on a particular newspaper's website?

I'm trying to find all comments by a particular user on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's website. The PD's user profiles don't helpfully link to past comments like MeFi profiles do. Searching for the username on the PD's (Yahoo!) search function yields only a transcript of a chat with a reporter in which this user participated. None of the user's comments on articles appear. Running a Google search for the username and restricting it to stltoday.com yields the same single result. It seems like only actual articles are being searched - not the separate "Discussion" pages that accompany all the articles.

I know the comments are out there. How can I find them, short of browsing every discussion page with my eyeballs? Would I need to build my own bot (something I'm not at all capable of doing)?

posted by PhatLobley to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

It sounds like the PD's content management system does not index comments in its search system, which means it may well be impossible to find them via conventional search methods.

In many enterprise-level news CMS's, comments are specifically not indexed for public search purposes, so as not to "pollute" search results with vitriol or even garden-variety opinion.

You may be better off asking someone at the PD for help in tracking down the comments. But I wouldn't count on it happening even if you do find a helpful hand. I know our comment system's in-house search capabilities are pretty crude and we're using a fairly complex and sophisticated CMS.
posted by jrchaplin at 5:10 PM on May 26, 2011

Google "site:stltoday.com username" maybe?
posted by humboldt32 at 10:47 PM on May 27, 2011