I've seen a few requests for how to search for things, without having a search term. It CAN be done. All you need is either a channel, or a submitter, to search within.

Go to the advanced search page.

This has multiple sections you can fill in, but you dont have to fill in them all. First, Her's a run down of the sections:

Box:-> Search Terms:
This is OPTIONAL. Most of your searches maybe for a specific word, searching the titles and tags. But it doesn't have to be. However, if you don't include a term, you have to help siftbot out a bit, and at least give him something else to work with form the other options below it.

Combo:-> Search Type:
This has 4 choices, and you must chose 1. Default selection is "Search Videos Only" which is fine if its videos you want.

Box:-> Channel:
This is optional, and taxes a "subdomain name" for a specific channel. What does that mean? Well, this is the page for the documentaries channel. At the top, it describes itself as Documentaries.VideoSift and its URL is documentaries.videosift.com. videosift.com is a domain name, and, it has subdomains, such as documentaries.videosift.com. The part before the .videosift.com "documentaries" is the name, for that subdomain, and this means that to search for all vids within the Documentary Channel, you need to put its subdomain name "documentaries" in that box.
So, to find the correct name for any channel you want, either, clcik the URL link to that channel on a sifted vid, or, go to the channels page which lists all channels, and find the one you want, and click on it's name their. This brings you to the page for that channel. The correct word/name for the "Box:-> Channel:" is the part before the .videosift.com in the URL bar and is probably right there at the top of the page. Now your on the channels page, you can see all the sifted or unsifted vids in that channel by clicking the page tabs at the top (you'll already be on the sifted tab by default).

Box:-> Submitter:
This is optional, but if you know who submitted the vid, this can be useful. Also, by going to their user page direct, you can see all sifted/unsifted/discarded/dead submissions direct by going ot the links at the top left of their page. For those diamonds with too many submissions to believe, the advanced searching may be much quicker though.

Selection Box:-> Status:
This is optional. You can select none/all or any combination. If you know the vid is alive, and sifted, select sifted. If your not sure if its still queued, select both sifted and unsifted to be searched, and so on. IF you select an option by mistake, you can unselect the choice by holding down ctrl and clicking the one you wish to deselect (Cmd+Click if on Mac).

Combo:-> Sort Order:
This is important. By default, "Most Relevant" will be selected. This is fine if you have placed a search term in the "Box:-> Search Terms:" but it's no good if you haven't. Without a term, siftbot cant order the results by most relevant, as their is no criteria to rank their relevance by. Instead, you must change the selection to something else. Newest/Oldest will allow siftbot to order the results by date, and Most Votes/Fewest Votes will allow him to order them by vote count. Most Votes is probably a good choice, but pick whichever best suites your search needs.

The next section only applies to searches for videos, and not, for searches of sift talk posts.

Boxes:-> Vote Threshold:
These are both optional, but if you know that the video had (or must have) at least a certain vote count, place the numbers here. You can add 1 both or neither.

Combo:-> Long:
This is very powerful. By default, "Include all videos" is chosen. However, you can change the selection to either restrict the results to ONLY videos that are Long or you can exclude all videos that are Long.

Combo:-> NSFW:
This combo works the same way, by default allowing ALl videos, but you can change this to either only NSFW videos, or no NSFW videos in the results siftbot finds.

I've mentioned that you can chose NOT to put anything in the "Box:-> Search Terms:" but siftbot must have enough info to be able to work with. here's what to do.

First, you must chose either a Channel, or a submitter (or both). Then, once you have placed the channel subdomain in the "Box:-> Channel:" or submitter name in "Box:-> Submitter:" you need to chose a status.

In the "Selection Box:-> Status:" you must now make a choice of at least 1 option. You can select all if you want, but this may return dead videos, so it may be better to restrict it to just Sifted+Unsifted or Sifted+Unsifted+Discarded

Next, you MUST change the choice in the "Combo:-> Sort Order:" from its default of "Most Relevant" to one of the other 5 choices. Most Votes is a good choice.

Now you're all done, and you can hit submit and siftbot will try to find you your hearts desires

Ok, so now you can search even without a term, but maybe you do know some of the terms you want to search for. Whats the best way to do this?

Well, to quote the advanced search page:

"Each term included by default. If searching with at least one term with 5 chars, these advanced search rules may be included:
• prefix term with minus (-) to exclude it
• prefix term with more-than (>) or less-than (<) to increase or decrease relevance • group multiple terms into a sub-query by surrounding them with parentheses ( and )
• surround one or more terms with quotes (") to search for exactly that text
• ex: "abc" -(yyy zzz) will find posts with exactly abc (not abcd) and not yyy nor zzz"

so, if one term (word) is atleast 5 letters long, you can play with a few extra commands.

If you want to search for a LolCat vid, involving a kidies swing, you might want to search for videos with the terms "Swing" and "cat". now, there are lots of cat videos. And only a few swing cat videos. So, if siftbot thought both terms were equally important, the vid you want might be low down in a long list. So, to make the "Swing" more important put the following in the box:

>Swing <Cat

Now lets say that there were more swing cat videos than you realized. Infact, theres so many out their that have horrid Dogs in them Ugh. You just know the vid you wanted didn't have dogs in it. So, you can exclude all dog videos from the search:

>Swing Now, supose you rememebr a phrase like James Bond, and you want to find "James Bond" vids, and not all vids involving James Earl Jones and Judy Bond. To do this, use quotes like:

"James Bond"

But, for that to be really powerful, the submitter would have had to include "James Bond", as a single tag.

In the end, we are at the mercy of the video titles (and using obscure and interesting titles gets them voted, which is bad motivation for clear video titles for searching) and the clarity and relivance of the tags. and " minds dont think alike, so the right tag can be hard to find.

Here is two example searches.

This is all the LONG videos in the documentaries channel, both sifted and unsifted, and ordered by most votes.

This is all the Comedy videos, excluding any that are flagged NSFW, and with the oldest videos first.

Holy shit! You've earned this! *Quality work!

Methinks you just saved Lucky from a lot of typing...

Awarding Thylan with one star point for this contribution to Sift Talk - declared quality by MarineGunrock.

Thanks MG, and one other thing i've just remembered.

If you use fire fox, you can right click on any text field (e.g. the submission box for searches) and select "Spell check this field". This is great for those like me who cant spell.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that!

If you use fire fox, you can right click on any text field (e.g. the submission box for searches) and select "Spell check this field".

Hey! It was me who told you that!

Great post btw.

^ and so the knowledge gets passed on

ok, big ups for the help on something that bugs me...
but...

any problem requiring such an enormous document to fix it is a DESIGN problem.

there is no way i should have to read and understand this just to go find long comedy videos.