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How to use advanced search

The search facility on Writing allows you to narrow your search down by various attributes of the posts you're searching for.

Normally, when you search—let's say for "grammar"—your search is applied literally, and the term you entered is looked for in each post, and posts are shown to you in order of how relevant they appear to be to your search. Sometimes, that's not enough to narrow down to the post(s) you're looking for, and that's where advanced search comes in useful.

To filter your search down, you can specify that only posts matching conditions you specify should be searched. For instance, instead of searching for "grammar", if you know that the post you're looking for scored above 20, you could search for score:>=20 grammar.

These conditions are known as qualifiers. As with the score qualifier above, for each qualifier you use you can specify both an operator (>=, <, etc) and a value (20). If you omit an operator, search will return only posts matching the value exactly.

The following qualifiers are currently available:

• score — filter by post score;
• created — filter by creation date: specifying created:<1y will return posts created less than one year ago. Similar suffixes are available for other time units: s, m, h, d, w, mo, and y. To search for posts between certain periods, specify twice: created:<1y created:>6mo grammar.
• user — filter by author: the value here must be the user ID of the user you wish to filter to, not their username, i.e. user:8045.