Looking for the MacPerl archives' Sherlock plugin?
Here's how the search engine works:
Please direct archive-related comments or suggestions to archives@bumppo.net.The search index is updated every morning at 4AM, Eastern US time.
Searches will either be interpreted as exclusive, "and" strings (where all search terms are connected with "and"; this the default) or complementary, "or" strings (where all search terms are connected with "or") based on your choice in the first popup above. Writing "new AND release AND software" is superfluous, just give the search terms and specify the connectors with the popup.
Phrase searching is not currently supported by the engine. This means that searching for "CPAN testers" will not limit itself to cases where the word "testers" follows the word "CPAN", and will instead (assuming that the default "exclusive" search type is in effect) yield every message which contains both of those words. Phrase searching is one of the eagerly anticipated features slated for the next version of ht://dig, the engine in use.
Searching for Perl modules? Queries for common strings like "XML::Parser" will fail, because the search engine unhelpfully views colons as separators. A search for "XML :: Parser" will work. Hopefully things will improve when ht://dig implements phrase searching. [Thanks to Axel Rose]
Punctuation characters like hyphens, periods, and @ signs are discarded in both search terms and in the search index. You can always tell if your search terms have been modified, as they will be reported as the first item in the search results.
Characters such as "<", ">", and "&" will be indexed as their HTML entities: '<', '>', and '&'. This can cause confusion in searches, because ampersands and semicolons will be stripped, as noted above, turning an ampersand into "amp" and a greater-than symbol into "gt" when they're indexed. This can be easily fixed, but fixing it will break some browsers.