How to do searches

just in need for some pointers on how to do searches for certain suttas…for example i am looking for a sutta in the samyutta (I tried samyutta nikaya and SN-both didnt seem to work) according to the pts its no I. 293, and just in general what are the paramaters when doing searches for specific suttas…

namo buddhaya!

I wonder whether something has changed with the suttacentral search.

The page on sutta numbering
https://suttacentral.net/sutta_numbering
says

For example, regardless of whether you type AN 1.71 or AN 1.8.1 into the “Search” box, the “Search results” screen will show the following:

AN 1.71 [AN 1.8.1]Kalyāṇamitta AN i 14

But typing AN 1.8.1 in the search on suttacentral does not turn up this result.

Another example on that page

For example, searching for SN i 185 will return this:

SN 3.13 [SN 124] Doṇapāka SN i 81 < SN i 185>
SN 8.1 [SN 209] Nikkhanta SN i 185 < SN i 398>

also doesn’t seem to work any more. ‘SN i 185’ turns up SA 185 in the drop down list from the search box, and the results page itself doesn’t seem to show either of the results that it should.

The help pages are out of date, I’m afraid. Try the advanced search to get closer to what you want.

@sujato thanks!

So @Bhante_Darma, if you go to the advanced search page https://suttacentral.net/advanced_search
and put SN i 293 into the vol/page box, you will see that there are no results. This is because there are no samyutta nikaya suttas listed as beginning on volume i page 293. However, if you enter SN i 29? in the same box (making sure wildcard mode is selected) you will see a list of all the SN suttas that are recorded as beginning on volume i page two-hundred-and-ninety-something.
https://suttacentral.net/advanced_search?target=suttas&limit=50&offset=0&mode=wildcard&name=&volpage=SN+i+29%3F&acronym=&division=&lang=

From the list of results you will see that SN5.8 begins on volume i page 292 of Somaratne’s 1998 edition (indicated by angle brackets, see https://suttacentral.net/sutta_numbering ), and SN5.9 begins volume i page 294.

So SN i 293 refers to something in the second half of SN5.8.

Thanks for the explanation.

I just go to the Division page and scroll down! For AN and SN, you can click on the main heading of the Division page and it gives you the full view of the entire nikāya, with the Volume/Page numbers displayed.

Personally I don’t really like the Advanced Search, we should be able to do all these things straight from the normal search input. But it will take a little while before we tweak everything to perfection.

And just to expand a little on the Help and other pages: we revised these when the new site came out, but since then there has been rapid change in many things. It would be nice to update these, but we have been too busy building stuff. Again, my personal preference is to simply do away with static Help pages and the like: I never use them and I think they are a poor design device. The interface should explain itself. In addition, we now have Discourse, which is there for specific questions and issues. Nevertheless, when the site design has settled a little we will probably get around to revising these.

How about partial-word searches? For example, searching for atakkāvacara gives no result, but searching for atakkāvacaraṃ does. Other search engines seem to have no trouble with this, for example the Digital Pali Reader.

Indeed; in fact i get two results for atakkāvacara, but many for atakkāvacaraṃ, including forms with other declensions, like atakkāvacaro.

Tuning the search results is an ongoing task; @blake will turn his attention to this when the main work is done on our translation app, in a week or so.

Meanwhile it’s helpful if you notice any other kinds of quirks you can record them here.

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Thank you. I was searching for occurrences of atakkāvacara with the aim of identifying Suttas containing the word and its variations. I’ll continue to compare, especially with Digital Pali Reader, which is powerful but doesn’t correlate with English translations.