It has come to my attention that the links to documentation for search on the search page aren't particularly conducive to convincing people to look at them, and the docs are so spectacularly snore inducing that no one actually makes it to the tasty bits.
Here's a draft cheat sheet for searching for stories and diaries for your comments and critique. Would something like this, linked from the search page, be an improvement?
Another cheat sheet covering comment search may be needed as well.
Update [2007-1-22 17:30:19 by jotter]: Thanks to an illuminating discussion with ct, I'm now able to correct misinformation I gave below re the format of story ids, sid. It turns out that there is time information encoded them. The format is as follows.
yyyy/mm/dd/hhmmss/junk
The problem is that zero's are suppressed, so a diary with a time of 11:01 looks the same as one of 1:11. In addition, if a diary is published the same day it was drafted, the time given is the time the draft was started, not the time the diary was published. So the time info in sids is a bit difficult to work with. But it is there!
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