MS support pages are screwed up. Need URL for Advanced Search.

Microsoft has changed from a one-page centric focus on performing a
search of their support knowledgebase to spreading it out amongst
product centers. The Search Help says that supposedly there should be
an Advanced Search link but there is not. I've seen it once but
Microsoft is continuing to modify their support site (for awhile I
couldn't even connect to it due to "maintenance"). In the simpleton
(i.e., basic) search dialog, I'll see:

o
o Search help

where the first bullet is blank. Presumably it should have the link to
perform an advanced search. Since the link is screwed up (because it
isn't there), I have no way to perform advanced searches.

The http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;KBHOWTO URL
used to take me to their advanced search page. Now I just get their
Basic Search dialog. In that page, there isn't even a Search Help link
but just one bullet (with no text), so their link to Advanced Search is
really screwed up. I can even see this in their HTML code for the tables
they use for the input field and bullet lists:

table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="list"
tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"/td
/tr
/table

Well, duh, there is NO string in the 2nd column. This should also have
an A tag for the URL to their Advanced Search page. If you look at a
page where there is an input field and followed by the empty bullet and
the bullet to Search Help, you see:

tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"/td --- There is NO text or URL here!
/tr
tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"a href="/?scid=gp;[ln];searchhelp" id="L_278"
title="Get search help"Search Help/a/td

So they managed to get the A tag with its URL to display okay for the
help page (which isn't much help and really is just a placeholder page).
But the first bullet is obviously missing the A tag with the URL to
their advanced search page. So if someone knows what is that URL then I
can go there directly rather than trying to rely on links on the basic
search pages but which are missing.

--
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Hi,

I'll be honest with ya it all seems to work on my PC, even tried it with
Mozilla and i see the advanced seach option.
Maybe you have a caching issue? it all sounds very strange.
anyway http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1 takes me direct to the
advanced help.

Regards
Paul Mckenna

"Vanguardx" see_signature wrote in message
...
Microsoft has changed from a one-page centric focus on performing a search
of their support knowledgebase to spreading it out amongst product
centers. The Search Help says that supposedly there should be an Advanced
Search link but there is not. I've seen it once but Microsoft is
continuing to modify their support site (for awhile I couldn't even
connect to it due to "maintenance"). In the simpleton (i.e., basic)
search dialog, I'll see:

o
o Search help

where the first bullet is blank. Presumably it should have the link to
perform an advanced search. Since the link is screwed up (because it
isn't there), I have no way to perform advanced searches.

The http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;KBHOWTO URL
used to take me to their advanced search page. Now I just get their Basic
Search dialog. In that page, there isn't even a Search Help link but just
one bullet (with no text), so their link to Advanced Search is really
screwed up. I can even see this in their HTML code for the tables they use
for the input field and bullet lists:

table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="list"
tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"/td
/tr
/table

Well, duh, there is NO string in the 2nd column. This should also have an
A tag for the URL to their Advanced Search page. If you look at a page
where there is an input field and followed by the empty bullet and the
bullet to Search Help, you see:

tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"/td --- There is NO text or URL here!
/tr
tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"a href="/?scid=gp;[ln];searchhelp" id="L_278" title="Get
search help"Search Help/a/td

So they managed to get the A tag with its URL to display okay for the
help page (which isn't much help and really is just a placeholder page).
But the first bullet is obviously missing the A tag with the URL to
their advanced search page. So if someone knows what is that URL then I
can go there directly rather than trying to rely on links on the basic
search pages but which are missing.

--
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"Paul Mckenna"
wrote in :
Hi,

I'll be honest with ya it all seems to work on my PC, even tried it
with Mozilla and i see the advanced seach option.
Maybe you have a caching issue? it all sounds very strange.
anyway http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1 takes me direct to
the advanced help.

I might have found the problem: spam blocking by my firewall. I had
forgotten to check my firewall's logfile which said:

Content Blocked:
Date Time: 10/13/2004 5:45:11 PM
User:
Action: Blocked
Type: Ad
URL: http://support.microsoft.com/search/...?qu=encryption
Data: A href="/search/?adv=1" (Reason: "?adv=")

It blocked the URL to the Advanced Search because of "?adv=" (which
means a parameter in the path portion of the URL looks to be specifying
some adv[ertisement] value). That would explain why the URL got
stripped out of the HTML coding that eventually got filtered and
presented to my web browser. It wasn't a cached page issue (since I
would still get whatever was in the cached page) but instead was an
issue of spam blocking filtering the HTML code to remove the URL. I had
to edit the web content filtering to NOT block any URLs with this string
somewhere in a URL for the microsoft.com domain.

Thanks for the URL, anyway. I'll save it as a shortcut for quick
access. I sure wish they would revert to a dropdown listbox of products
rather than make me navigate to yet another page to scan through a
pagefull of listings and often with a "more..." selection that requires
me to navigate to yet another page. That is easier than a simple
dropdown listbox?

--
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"Paul Mckenna"
wrote in :
Hi,

I'll be honest with ya it all seems to work on my PC, even tried it
with Mozilla and i see the advanced seach option.
Maybe you have a caching issue? it all sounds very strange.
anyway http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1 takes me direct to
the advanced help.

Regards
Paul Mckenna

"Vanguardx" see_signature wrote in message
...
Microsoft has changed from a one-page centric focus on performing a
search of their support knowledgebase to spreading it out amongst
product centers. The Search Help says that supposedly there should
be an Advanced Search link but there is not. I've seen it once but
Microsoft is continuing to modify their support site (for awhile I
couldn't even connect to it due to "maintenance"). In the simpleton
(i.e., basic) search dialog, I'll see:

o
o Search help

where the first bullet is blank. Presumably it should have the link
to perform an advanced search. Since the link is screwed up
(because it isn't there), I have no way to perform advanced searches.

The http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;KBHOWTO
URL used to take me to their advanced search page. Now I just get
their Basic Search dialog. In that page, there isn't even a Search
Help link but just one bullet (with no text), so their link to
Advanced Search is really screwed up. I can even see this in their
HTML code for the tables they use for the input field and bullet
lists: table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="list"
tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"/td
/tr
/table

Well, duh, there is NO string in the 2nd column. This should also
have an A tag for the URL to their Advanced Search page. If you
look at a page where there is an input field and followed by the
empty bullet and the bullet to Search Help, you see:

tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"/td --- There is NO text or URL here!
/tr
tr
td class="bullet"•/td
td class="text"a href="/?scid=gp;[ln];searchhelp" id="L_278"
title="Get search help"Search Help/a/td

So they managed to get the A tag with its URL to display okay for
the help page (which isn't much help and really is just a
placeholder page). But the first bullet is obviously missing the A
tag with the URL to their advanced search page. So if someone knows
what is that URL then I can go there directly rather than trying to
rely on links on the basic search pages but which are missing.

--
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******** Post replies to newsgroup - Share with others ********
Email: lh_811newsATyahooDOTcom and append "=NEWS=" to Subject.
__________________________________________________ _______________

So how do I get more than just 20 matches from a search? Whether I do a
basic or advanced search, I only get 20 hits listed. I'll search under
Windows XP for "memory" and get only 20 hits. I really doubt there are
only 20 KB articles regarding Windows XP that have the word "memory" in
them. I switch to search on All Products for "memory" and still only
got 20 matches. Come one, 20 matches across of of the knowledgebase on
the word "memory"? Yeah, right.

You used to be able to specify a max of 25 to 150 hits. Now you only
get 20. Yeah, that's progress. Only if I remember to check the
Category box (to group the hits by category) can I see more matches
because only then does a "more..." link appear. However, even when
Category is checked, you only get to see 20 matches within a category.
When I used to be able to specify up to 150 matches, sometimes the
article that was appropriate wasn't found until somewhere around the
80th or 120th match, so it would never appear when the result list gets
truncated to only the first 20. If you search of all microsoft.com
rather than just on the product on which you want to focus then you can
get more than 20 matches, but then you're mixing it a bunch of unrelated
crap. This seems geared towards the limitations of display present in
Help and Support applet in Windows XP.

I had my firewall (and so its ad blocking) disabled when trying to see
how many matches I could get. You are almost forced to use their
http://search.microsoft.com page instead of their
http://support.microsoft.com page.


--
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