How to enter search terms properly?

[BigBen]

I am looking for a story about a couple of young brothers who end up in Key West.  The story is one of several by the same author involving a group of gay couples in the city.

I have entered the following search settings, and several thousand stories turn up.  The ones I've randomly checked out contain only the word "brother," and lack the phrase "Key West."  Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Edited May 14, 2021 by BigBen

[Myr]

On 5/14/2021 at 1:24 PM, BigBen said:

Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Nothing really.  Unfortunately, Google has trained people to expect the answer they are looking for because Google's thousands of employees, billions of dollars and thousands of hours of work behind the scenes makes it so. For everyone else, we must rely on default software search hitting on a database with no processing skills beyond "this word OR that word" and "this word AND that word." 

Unlike Google, it doesn't do concepts or guesses or anything else. 

The only advice I can give is to focus on key west, as there are considerably less story chapters listed from that. OR go over to the story forum and post a description and ask your fellow members if they know what story you mean.

With over 166,000,000 words posted in stories on the site, our poor database mostly just pukes on itself when you ask it to look at itself.

[BigBen]

Thanks, Myr.  It's good to know I'm not doing anything wrong.  It just seemed odd that AND-ing "Key West" with "brother" would yield results that contained only one of the two terms.  If this is expected behavior, then so be it.  (I've tried to write my own search algorithm, and it's indeed a tricky task.)

I just accidentally found four stories I'd been looking for.  They all happened to be by the same author, and they were all right there in plain sight on the sites where his stories are to be found.  One of the stories is entitled "Fantasy Faire"—but did a search on "fantasy" AND "faire" turn it up?  One guess, lol!  The sites where the story is located have no search function of their own, and they also apparently block access to Internet searches.  Oh, well!  I'm sure I'll stumble on some of the other stories I'm looking for one of these days . . . (and perhaps I'll get better at bookmarking before reading than I am at remembering to bookmark after, lol!).

Edited May 16, 2021 by BigBen

[Myr]

3 minutes ago, BigBen said:

Oh, well!  I'm sure I'll stumble on some of the other stories I'm looking for one of these days . . . (and perhaps I'll get better at bookmarking before reading than I am at remembering to bookmark after, lol!).

This is part of the reason we added "Reading History" and "Collections" as features here at Gay Authors.  Of course, that only helps when you are logged in and make use of them. lol. Meh.  Every little bit helps!

[BigBen]

4 minutes ago, Myr said:

Of course, that only helps when you are logged in and make use of them. lol. Meh.  Every little bit helps!

You mean, sort of like backing up my data? 🤣😁😊