[Obsolete as of 22 June 2024] Ever wondered why you couldn't find the posts you were looking for? Did you ever look for a post by its own name with no success? In my opinion, these problems plague the community and prevent us from properly growing to our potential. However, with just a few tricks we can be a lot more effective in our search!

1. Spaces are the Enemy For whatever reason the presence of spaces (" ") inside your query might mess everything up. Try using "_" rather than spaces. This should be more in line with what you were trying to do and avoid needlessly filtering out a bunch of stuff.

2. Hashtags may confuse the engine When looking specifically for a prompt containing a # in its title may be troublesome. Try performing the same search omitting #.

3. Search by hashtags can be more powerful Lastly, the standard search feature doesn't seem to really use hashtags added by the user to the post. As far as I know, the only way to properly use the "hashtag-search" is to open the guides section (by design they are just posts with the guide hashtag). After that you can search for a different term (hashtag). Luckily, if you are unsure of the hashtag to use, you can start writing and see which tags are recognized by the system. These are the very same tags the system suggests when you select them in a post.

3.1 Adding additional terms with hashtag-search However, you will soon notice that the engine only seems to allow one hashtag at a time, incredibly limiting its use. You can manually change the url adding after "?tag=" a list of tags separated by "+". As far as I can tell, only the first term is treated as a proper hashtag; all others can behave as you would expect or almost randomly (perhaps because of partial matches with the prompt). You can give this one a try but it isn't always a reliable way to combine different tags.

If I missed something or if something is incorrect please let me know. I'll try to keep this updated as long as the search system is as unintuitive as it seems. Updated June 2024