Computer Question (Robespierre or others)
 

Is there a way to get the Ctrl-F function of your browser (edit find in top window function) to work on the right hand window of Fodors? I have tried this many times and it always seems to search only in the left-hand topics window. I'm sure the solution is simple but it escapes my feeble attempts.

This page is in Frames. Take your mouse and click on a white area on the list to the left (where the postings are listed). Then hit Control F. It will search on the box you are clicked on. I know I am not Robespierre, but I thought I would answer so you could get on with your search.

The OP wants the RIGHT-hand frame, not left, but the idea is the same--click your mouse pointer somwhere in the right frame and then hit ctrl-F.

Oops sorry! You are right, I reread the post. Thanks for the clarification. That is what I get for zooming through the posts so quick and answering too fast. Thank you!

Bringing this post to the front as it has been very useful as I search this forum!

E.g., if I'm searching for <i>The Hague</i>, almost any post concerning <i>Amsterdam/The Netherlands</i> will select. (Not many posts are specifically about The Hague.) By using the Find Function, I can easily zero in on my area of interest.

And THANK YOU to the original posters!

As another tip, don't add words to your search that are completely unnecessary and may negatively affect the results. For example, there is no reason whatsoever to search for &quot;the hague&quot; when you only need to search for the word hague alone.

I don't know if this is explicitly stated anywhere, but the Fodor's search function defaults to looking for all the terms in the query box, regardless of where they occur. So if you enter <b>paris hotel</b>, you will get every thread that has those two words in it - even if one is in a post containing the phrase &quot;I hate Paris&quot; and the other in &quot;Hotel California.&quot; The technical term for this kind of search is &quot;Boolean AND.&quot;

But quotation marks in the search string will target the search - <b>&quot;paris hotel&quot;</b> will return threads containing one or more posts having the exact juxtaposition of those words.

By the way, I get very good results from using Google search instead of Fodor's - just enter your search criteria followed by <b>site:fodors</b><b>.com</b>

&quot;<i>I get very good results from using Google search instead of Fodor's - . . . . . .</i>&quot;

That trick used to work, but no longer does and hasn't for quite some time. Editor Katie confirms on another thread: &quot;<i>google discontinued supporting our Forums last year because the Forums are in frames</i>&quot;

If you enter <b>&quot;fodor's travel guides&quot; site:fodors</b><b>.com</b> in Google, you will get 168,000 links that were indexed prior to that dark day when Google dropped support for frames.

By adding your search criteria to the above, you might be able to find what you're looking for. It's worth a shot.

(<i>p.s.</i> If Fodor's would make their thread database visible to robots, Google would have the whole site indexed in a couple of days.)

Maybe they could just modify robots.txt, because /lib sounds suspiciously like a database directory:

<b># http://www.fodors.com/robots.txt

User-Agent: *

Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /admin-ng/
Disallow: /destinations/
Disallow: /partner_feeds/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /gatekeepers/
Disallow: /support/
Disallow: /wireless/

# Identifies location of fodors.com sitemaps

Sitemap: http://www.fodors.com/sitemap.xml</b>