OT; Negative reviews?

Think of a complex sentence that expresses what you want and type that in, e.g.:

I want to check out if anyone has had a negative experience or bad review of British Gas, Anglian Windows, B&Q Kitchens or Lloyds TSB

Have you actually tried using the advanced search in Google?

If not, try it to filter your search results and you might have a surprise!

As for the firms that you have listed, you will find may disgruntled customers of those - particularly British Gas who were fined £2.5 million last July over customer complaint handling!

Not fully answering your questions, but seek and you'll certainly find.

Do web searches along the lines of : "problems with" "British Gas"

Alter to suit.

Derek G

Probably not the search he wants.. "problems with" "medway handyman" returns ~2000 hits.

Doing the same with BG will produce even more useless hits.

Try searching Google groups instead, e.g.

Sometimes adding the word forum to the search will show some results with discussions.

I've found that creative use of quotes and colons gives interesting results in most search engines, but have you tried

Sorry to hijack the thread but the other day I was googling for info about a particular computer problem. I found what I wanted - eventually

- but it threw up loads of hits from as early as 2004. Now in computer terms, because everything moves so quickly, seven years ago may as well be prehistoric (I got something 9 months ago that is now obsolete and been superceded twice) so is there a way to force hits only from, say,

Google advanced search should do that. Once you've done a normal search it appears as an option at the foot of the page, and the date thing is a further option. Probably an easier way but I don't use it much.

Did you look at doing an advanced search? Hmmm, , no looks like Giggle doesn't give you a way to exclude by date, what about Bing, Yahoo, etc?

Well I'm blowed so it does. Right in front of my nose and I missed it - sorry.

With google, there are various refinements available in the left hand bar after you search, you can filter a date range, if you want to create your own URLs, the dates are in USA format, e.g.

On the left hand side of a standard google search you click Custom Range or Past Year

Everything's there somewhere, but they like us to play hunt the thimble :-)

I see "More search tools" on the left, that opens up time choices plus a few other options.

And at the bottom of the page I see "Advanced search" which provides even more options.

I wonder how come I'm replying to threads on diybanter.com when I've never heard of it?

because DIYbanter steals Usenet postings and reformats them into a web based forum.

Owain

DIYbanter (and the other banter sites) hoovers up posts from usenet, and presents them in a webforum.

Search, with Google:

site:forums.moneysavingexpert.com "british gas"

Obviously that's only one website, but there's a /lot/ of traffic on MSE and most of it's of a consumer nature, so it's more likely to be relevant. That will show up the good as well as the bad, but people are more likely to post to forums with the bad.

MSE's own search isn't great, so Google is a better search to use on it.

Theo