How does one get better at using search? (both on KF and on the web as a whole)

[skykiii]

So I've had several cases where I wanted to find something I know I've seen before, but was unable to in part because of not remembering key details and not knowing what to search for.

For example, I remember someone here had screencapped a tweet of a doctor bragging about transitioning a kid. But I couldn't find it using the forum search.

On Youtube I saw a video where a guy was at some sort of public meeting and he delivered a very clever takedown of Democrat policies (he basically tried to sound like them, even having "pronouns," and spoke in a positive tone but his actual words were very critical). I went thru my history but... could not find it. Because I could not remember what the video was called or who was in it.

So... how do you find things when you remember them but have very little info?

 

[Tablet County]

Stop playing with your wiener and everything will fall into place.

 

[debristar]

sounds like you've forgotten where you placed your dildo and you're racing against time to find it before your wife gets home and finds it first.

 

[We Are The Witches]

For the Kiwifarms search, if you lack all details what do you want people to tell you? You are bound to search by keywords, restrict it to a particular board (by using the "This forum" or "This thread"), or search by user, if you remember which Kiwifarmer posted it, or suspect it.

On YouTube it's another thing. Besides your YT history, you may search in your browser's history, maybe it's still there.

Besides from that, try to remember specific phrases he said, maybe that's referenced somewhere that will link towards that video, who he was, where he was, etc. If you're confident this is a popular person, you may ask AI to see if it can give you a match and continue from there.

If you go full you may use YouTube's API and search for terms under entire channels, after making a list of the channels you think you would have watched that on. So for example, if I knew it was broadcasted under Fox News on YT, I can then use the API to search for terms posted under their comment section, and if by any chance I get decent matches, I would be able to go to the video where it was posted.
But this will give a lot of false positives, because people comment about a lot of things, in the most erratic way, there are bots that post text-walls, and there may be a lot of instances where their comment matches your scenario but it's not really that one.

Next time bookmart it/like it/etc so that you don't lose it.

 

[COME ON OUT YOU RAPIST]

Maybe if you saved things or perpetuated them on websites you used, you wouldn't have to rely on Google or other things enshittifying themselves.

 

[Achtung Bitter]

Only way is to try and remember more keywords, I usually can recall parts of sentences.

 

[bango skank]

I just wish there was a way for KF search results to at least be sorted by post date, instead of whatever random jumble it is that it spits out.

 

[Nigga Bullshit]

On Youtube I saw a video where a guy was at some sort of public meeting and he delivered a very clever takedown of Democrat policies (he basically tried to sound like them, even having "pronouns," and spoke in a positive tone but his actual words were very critical). I went thru my history but... could not find it. Because I could not remember what the video was called or who was in it.

This site can be very useful for finding YouTube videos if you can't remember the title. It searches through auto-generated captions. If you remember a particular phrase that was said in the video, try putting it in quotation marks and searching it.

It's good for searching VODs as well, saves you from scrubbing through hours of footage for a 30 second clip.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

By doing seances and asking the machine spirits.

 

[HamEnjoyer]

Three things that are pretty good to generally know about search engines is that pretty much all of them support phrase searches by putting quotes around the search terms, they usually also support negative search terms by prefixing a search term (usually) with a minus/dash symbol and a good chunk of them also support OR searches done by putting|vertical|bars|like|this between search terms. (Not sure if KF's engine supports the last one)

E.g.: Let's say you are directly searching on Twitter for the tweet from the doctor you mentioned. You remember the keywords "transed" and "kids" from the tweet. Your search should as such look like this to start off.

transed kids

Let's also say the doctor's tweet was a response to someone else and that you remember that he insulted the person he responded to with "[...] you fucking [...]", but don't remember what exactly he insulted the user as. You can then extend your search to this.

transed kids "you fucking"

Further, let's say you're back in the days of #dropkiwifarms and your search results are filled with retards defending their 100 % heckin' valid fart queen Keffals, because he advertised the DIY estrogen shit. You can remove any mentions of Keffals by adding -keffals.

transed kids "you fucking" -keffals

Lastly, let's say you then remember that the doctor either used "idiot" or "chud" as the insult.

transed kids "you fucking" -keffals idiot|chud

This will hopefully narrow down the results enough to where you can find the tweet easily.

Usually you can also combine the phrase searches with the other two.

-"you fucking faggot"

"you fucking chud"|"you fucking retard"

There is one thing to note about non-simple search terms though: Normally, if a search engine gets a simple search term like "kid" to look for, it will also return results which contain "kids". This is pretty often not the case with non-simple search terms and it will only search for the exact whole word/words that the term contains.
E.g. If the doctor tweeted "[...] you fuckingg chuds.", you may not find the tweet. As he accidentally added an additional "g" to "fucking" and also used the plural of "chud", meaning that neither the "you fucking" part nor the idiot|chud part will work.