1

Case in point…
[even if I was looking at a Super User question & the terms I was starting from are very generic, it felt best to ask in Ask Different, as my 'home' community]

Why does my screensaver say [myname]'s Macbook Pro (4)

I was trying to start with a broad search for issues where the Mac name increments by number…

Not being sure where to start I went for (2) as a start point, hoping to hone it later…
Unfortunately, results coming in were 'anything including a 2'

I'm no expert in grep or anything like that, but I'm not bad at honing down Google searches, by keyword, site: etc.

Does SE have any 'honing tools' for this type of broad start point?
Things like AND, OR, "full-string" etc?

1

There's a full guide to searching at /help/searching.

Exact match searches are accomplished by enclosing the string in ". Punctuation is excluded from search strings, even when using exact match.

If all else fails, you can always search using Google with the site:apple.stackexchange.com parameter.

  • That may have been my issue. I really needed "(2)" as the string, yet it was ignoring punctuation. Google does the same, unfortunately. I think it's just one of those edge-cases where I really would have been better-off following the old farmer's advice when asked directions…"Well, you don't want to start from here." ;) – Tetsujin May 9 '15 at 16:52

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