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This question, Search doesn't work well with URLs, is about searching for posts with links to http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html, and includes that link as plain text in the question (which is then auto-linkified).

Thus, if we search for posts with that link here on Meta, that post should come up.
Actual results vary.

  • naive - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html - 0 results
  • quotes - "http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html" - 1 result
  • url search - url:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html - 0 results
  • url w/quotes - url:"http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html" - 2 results
  • url no protocol - url:www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html - 0 results
  • url no protocol quoted - url:"www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html" - 0 results
  • url w/wildcard - url:*.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html - 0 results
  • url w/wildcard quoted - url:"*.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html" - 3 results

(Some or all of these searches will presumably have their results changed once this post is indexed, but the results should be reproducible with any other link.)

This answer, which also includes that exact text as the title of a link (but not the link target), is never found with any of these searches.

The search FAQ entry doesn't have any tips about these differing behaviors, and the advanced search tips just offers the terse url:"*.example.com" with no further explanation of the ins and outs.

I'm sure that there's some rhyme or reason to explain all this, but either the url: search restriction needs to be documented a lot better or the behavior fixed to be more intuitive (or both!).

Google is useless in this instance because real results are overwhelmed by spurious results for question list pages (which is a separate problem).

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1 Answer 1

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Please retry the results, I've made some search tweaks that will help in many cases. The changes are as follows:

  • / and \ are now allowed
  • URL searches are auto-wildcarded front and back

The combination of these should mean URL searches are much more intuitive overall. I'm on the fence of if a URL should be wildcarded if you included quotes already meaning an exact match in most other situations. If that becomes an issue then I'll adjust the behavior to not wildcard that case.

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