Skip to main content
Meta Stack Exchange

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

18
  • This would be helpful in so many ways.
    – Taryn
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 2:41
  • 10
    Google does index comments. I use it all the time for searching them.
    – tchrist
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 2:44
  • @tchrist they do? Hmm, I haven't had much luck with that. I'll take another look. (Still, if I could do it on-site, that'd be even better!)
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 2:47
  • 16
    This is another one that shouldn't only be available to high-rep users. This should be available to all users.
    – pacoverflow
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 18:12
  • 2
    @pacoverflow from the question: "I'm looking for unlockables that could be spread around reputation levels like tapas dishes." People seem to be assuming these would be 30k+, but it doesn't actually say that and I'm not assuming it in my answer.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Apr 17, 2015 at 23:07
  • 6
    @MonicaCellio: Why should there be any reputation requirement at all on a simple functional non-harmful site feature?
    – corsair992
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 3:25
  • 2
    @corsair992 Similar to view vote counts. It's just a lot of server strain if everyone gets to do it.
    – Scimonster
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 20:51
  • 1
    @Scimonster: Indexing the comments as well as the questions and answers should take up at most twice the space. Just like the argument for restricting vote counts, this is also a bad argument. Any such costs should be measured and considered in detail with a cost-benefit analysis, before using them as a vague argument for restricting all but the most essential features. I doubt it will be used that much anyway, if introduced as a separate feature from the general search.
    – corsair992
    Commented Apr 18, 2015 at 21:19
  • Comments often include (or are) links to other topics. If you search for keywords in a topic title with this feature enabled, the search results will include not just questions, but also answers (which is already more than you want) and furthermore comments too.
    – ChrisW
    Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 11:20
  • @ChrisW I didn't mean we should mix comments into search results willy-nilly; I agree that could add noise. I was thinking of a specific directive, e.g. is:comment, so you could search comments intentionally. I've edited that in.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jun 17, 2015 at 12:56
  • I'm using this query. It's pretty clear how to change it to search not only comments of a particular user.
    – TLama
    Commented Jun 18, 2015 at 20:38
  • 1
    Thanks @TLama! This definitely helps with comments that are older than the time of the last data dump, which covers many of the cases.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Jun 18, 2015 at 20:39
  • @JohEricson, if searching comments doesn't burden the site in some way, then I agree it would be useful to have for everybody.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Oct 23, 2015 at 21:16
  • @JonEricson re the decline -- bummer, but if the devs can't do it with the current architecture, I can't exactly ask them to make magic happen. :-) One question, though: were they looking at searching both posts and comments in a single search? That's not what I was asking for; I proposed searching only comments (instead of the default of searching only posts) if you use the enabling syntax. I suspect that mixing comments in with posts on general searches would be pretty noisy.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Nov 12, 2015 at 20:01
  • 1
    @JonEricson revisit this perhaps? :)
    – theforestecologist
    Commented Jan 3, 2019 at 3:26