David said:
I'm sorry for posting this question here, but I couldn't find a more
appropriate place to ask this question.
For many years, we've been able to go to
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1
to search the Microsoft Knowledgebase for information. But now whenever I
search there I get thousands upon thousands of crappy results from
social.microsoft.com that are of absolutely no use to me, and there is no
way to filter those results.
Does anyone know of a way to search and return result from only the
Knowledgebase, or have they taken that away from us, too?
Even more exasperating is that there is an advanced option to NOT
(deselect) inclusion of their "Community" threads in the search but they
do NOT honor that choice. Even after deselecting to include Community
discussions, they still include them in their search results. You can
eliminate the Community fluff from the search results by deselecting
"Microsoft support content" under advanced options and instead selecting
"Search Microsoft.com"; however, that search is not limited to just the
articles from their knowledgebase.
The result of spewing the non-official articles into their default
search is to implicate that Microsoft really hasn't a clue on how to
solve a problem and they no longer even trust their own KB articles. By
polluting their search results with non-official articles, they turned a
useful knowledgebase into an amateurbase full of non-helpful,
inaccurate, invalid, incomplete, or malicious responses.
If I wanted the same [low] level of unfocused results from a search, I'd
do a Google search. It certainly appears that Microsoft intends to
abandon their knowledgebase and resort to web searches that include
mostly pointless external references. Wonder how long before we start
seeing the sponsored ads typical of online search engines.
I currently have a search prefix "mss" defined in Windows (usable from
any address bar, including the Address toolbar in Windows taskbar).
It's easy using TweakUI powertoy. That will generate with my search
string in the URL to do a search at Microsoft's support knowledgebase
site. Because of how Microsoft has ****ed up their KB search with the
pollution of Community posts, I tried the suggestion of instead creating
a search prefix that works with Google and adds the
"inurl:support.microsoft.com/" parameter to the search URL (since "/kb/"
may not be present in a URL to a Microsoft KB article since several path
formats have been used and are still valid). That didn't work too well
since articles were found that are not from Microsoft.
The problem with the inurl parameter for a Google search is that it also
matches on URLs *within* the matched article, not just on the URL to
that article. From
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html,
maybe you have to include the site operator for inurl to work as
expected (by looking only in the URL and not in the document). However,
once you add the site operator, you probably don't need the inurl
operator. Notice the following Google searches include sites that are
not Microsoft's:
http://www.google.com/search?q=+remember++password++inurl:support.microsoft.com
Lots of sites are included that are not Microsoft sites. However, the
site operator works better, as in:
http://www.google.com/search?q=+remember++password++site:support.microsoft.com
Pretty sad when a Google search performs better than Microsoft's own
search on their own knowledgebase.
