Is there any way to use Google (or another search engine) to search Metafilter for the exact string "Metafilter: "?

July 25, 2004 5:46 PM

re : this. This has been bugging me for a while - is there any way to use Google (or another search engine) to search Metafilter for the exact string "Metafilter: "?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

To the best of my knowledge, Google discards punctuation in queries and doesn't consider it in indexing, so string literal matches don't actually work. So, no.
posted by majick at 5:50 PM on July 25, 2004

Nope, it's impossible. Perhaps some other search engine? After all, you don't need all the things that make google as wonderful as it is, just something that indexes metafilter and allows searching for punctuation.
posted by fvw at 6:43 PM on July 25, 2004

stav, you could probably adapt a basic (php based) http crawler to crawl/scrape /mefi/XXXXX threads starting at 1 and on up but I'd ask matt if it is ok before hammering at the server.

Amusingly, I too tried to search google for "metafilter:" tags a few weeks back with no success, and like fvw mentions, found it impossible.

I'll see if I can whip something up when I get a spare moment.
posted by shoepal at 12:15 PM on July 26, 2004

Escape the colon?
posted by joeclark at 4:06 PM on July 26, 2004

I asked a similar question here, but got no useful responses, although I have had an e-mail from kenko, who has done some work on a script.
posted by dg at 4:46 PM on July 26, 2004