ampfixer
Old news is what you're going to find until Google allows you to search the future.
Ooh, I want that feature!
Searching for
anything on the internet has been a crapshoot since the earliest days (any old-timers remember Archie?). As the sheer volume of information explodes exponentially it just keeps getting harder. Try to look up a person's name who happens to share the same name as, say, a famous pop singer.
This is the basic problem with text-based searches. Databases are my life (sad, I know). I write queries all day long for mining information from enormous collections of raw data, and the
absolute last resort for finding something is to perform an unqualified text search. You are almost guaranteed loads of irrelevant records.
A few tips that might help you when querying via the Google search engine:
1. Use quotes. If your search term is a phrase or compound word, quoting it will eliminate a lot of bogus results. For example, "manic compressor" (with the quotes) will avoid hits on air compressors and mental illnesses.
2. Use the + symbol. If you type in
compressor + plugin
that will only return results that contain
both words, although not necessarily in that sequence. Without the "+", you'll be back to air compressors again.
3. Use the "-" symbol. The opposite of the + sign, putting "-" in front of a word tells the search engine to eliminate results that contain that word.
west -kanye
will give you records with the word "west" in them, but eliminate the Kanye West references.
4. Use wildcards. An asterisk serves as a wildcard character. If you want to find out about SONAR X1 and nothing else, search on
site:cakewalk.com X* -X2 -X3
This means give me everything that contains words
beginning with "X", but not "X2" or "X3".
5. Specify whether you want to search titles only or bodies only, using the "allintitle" and "allintext" qualifiers.
allintitle:PRV
will specifically look in titles for "PRV", and ignore the main text. This can be handy when searching the forum.
site:forum.cakewalk.com allintitle:bitflipper
will return every forum thread where "bitflipper" occurs in the thread title (11,500 times, turns out).
There are a bunch of other keywords, but I don't ever use them so you'll have to google them.
6. Specify the site. This isn't always as straightforward as you might think.
site:cakewalk.com PRV
will get you not only forum posts with the word "PRV", but also pages from the SONAR help manual, the Cakewalk blogs, marketing material, and CakeTV videos. If you specifically want to search the forum, use
site:forum.cakewalk.com PRV
If you're looking for a post you made about the PRV that was specific to Platinum, use
site:forum.cakewalk.com PRV + sharke + Platinum
IF you get a bunch of results about X3, you could exclude it:
site:forum.cakewalk.com PRV + sharke + Platinum -X3