Search engine tips/optimisation

As people are often referred to the search engine when asking stuff that's been well covered before I thought a thread about optimising search engine use may be good.

I've just done a search using 'search' which produced thousands of results, then used 'search tips' and 'search optimisation' which produced none.

So I'll assume that there isn't already a thread like this one; if anyone knows of one then please let me know.

I guess there's two ways to progress, firstly anyone who has learnt any good time saveing tricks with the engine can post them, secondly, people can ask questions about the search function.

My questions are: -

1. The search seems to default to restricting itself to the particular forum it is called from i.e. a search in the 'social discussion' will search only the 'social discussion' threads.

There is also the option of searching all open forums, or choosing any single forum from a drop down list.

I find the 'all open forums' to be tediously slow; is there some way to exclude a few particular forums, other than running several consequtive searchs?

2. Sometimes it is useful to post a link to a particular thread; this is just a matter of copying and pasting the page address.

However, when the search function returns its list of threads, the page address is just the HOP homepage address.

Is their any way to link to a page of search results?

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