Better Searching for FlexCoders

As the popularity of Flex 2 increases, so does the popularity of the FlexCoders mailing list. Because of this, having a good mechanism for searching the list is extremely important. It allows list members to see if a question has been asked before they ask it again (you should always search before you post), and it also allows people to find conversations that they remembering reading in the past.

The search on the Yahoo groups page isn't the greatest, which makes searching difficult. The list is archived through mail-archive with better search functionality, but there's still plenty to be desired. For example, just try searching for "date" and notice how there are 0 entries returned.

So, a better solution is obviously needed. Enter Google.

The mail-archive site is indexed by Google, and since Google is good for searching (so I hear), you can use the power of Google to find FlexCoders messages.

Whenever you want to search for something on FlexCoders, just add "inurl:flexcoders" to the keywords. It's as simple as that... a handy little trick that makes finding information about Flex a little bit easier.

One important thing to note is that you'll generally only see the first two entries from the mail-archive site. You'll need to click the "More results from www.mail-archive.com" to get all of the results. An alternative is to also add "site:www.mail-archive.com" to the keywords as well. Google turned up 8,040 "date" entries, to mail-archives 0.

Anyway, I'm sure many of you out there already knew this.. but since the FlexCoders FAQ still points to the search on the mail-archive site, I thought I'd offer up this better technique (in my opinion) to the community. Have fun...