Advanced Resource Searching

Advanced searching is all about trying to find the information you want without having to sort through 100 result pages. The advanced search page provides 5 filters options to help narrow down the search. Each filter reduces the number of resources returned. Leaving any single filter blank effectively disables that filter, and leaving them all blank returns all resources in the database. These filters can be combined to produce powerful searches.

Filter by Type: This pretty straight forward and only returns resources of the type selected (you can check more than one type).

Filter by Terms: Fill the term field with keyword (or phrase) that you are looking for and select which fields you wish the keyword to be compared against. Only resource containing the given keyword in the selected fields will be returned. If you know part of the title of a book your looking for, you can enter the term and select the Title checkbox to avoid getting back unrelated resource.

Filter by Name: Here you can filter resources by a specific author or developer. If you enter a developer name, you can select either the resources that they have submitted, resource that they have commented on, or resources that they have rated. If you filter by Rator the Rating option becomes the rating issued by that developer. Search for all resources rated 3 or over by Rick by entering Rick into the Name field, select the Rator radio option, and set the Rating option to 3.

Filter by Rating: Return only resources which have a rating greater than or equal to the number selected. This is a fast way to narrow down your search, but be careful as a resource's rating may not always reflect it's value to you. Normally this filter applies to the average rating of a resource, but if you are searching for resources rated by a specific developer, then this field represents the actual rating of that developer (see the section above).

Filter by Date(Since): This simply returns only those ratings that have been posted after the selected date. This is useful when you are looking for new items. If you have searched for a particular topic in the past, you can re-issue the search and include a date to filter out those resources you've already examined.

By far one of the most effective method is filtering for recommended resources. There is a link in the Resource section of every profile that performs this search, which is basically a search for all resources which that developer has rated 3 or more. Using the link on the profile page will give you all resources recommended by that developer, but using the advanced search page you can narrow that down to a specific topic. This can be done by entering the topic into the Terms field, enter the developer name in the Name field, select the Rator radio button and then select a rating of 3.