delicious - how to search

[harrigan]

Tips for searching delicious!

Updates shown in red or strikethru were made Nov 2011 after the Delicious migration disaster. If you have questions, please comment here and we'll do our best to help!

Here's an explanation of how to find fics recommended at spn_littlebro. Whenever a story (or author) is rec'd in that community, we'll try to add it to the spn_littlebro delicious collection within a week. Delicious gives you the ability to search by one or more tags to find exactly what you're in the mood for!

New to delicious? Tags are like filters. You pick one or more tags, and delicious goes through all the entries in the collection you've selected, and picks the ones you ask it to filter out and return for your reading pleasure! (Of course, you can search on nothing at all, and just peruse ALL the entries archived!)

Or you can search for one tag, or for multiple tags. If you search for multiple tags, then a story must have ALL the tags you selected, or it won't be returned to you. It's not an either/or kind of search.

At the right side of delicious, you'll see [tags]. It will help if you click sort by [alpha] and then [view all]. After that, you can choose at the top of the page whether to view the tags as a list or as a cloud. Anything before the = sign or the : symbol is what we used to call a 'tag bundle' or label. We've just lost the ability to collapse them to save space.

At the right side of delicious, you'll see tag bundles. You can click to expand them (or shrink them) to get specific tags. You can make your search as simple or intricate as you want. You can pick just one tag out of one bundle to search on, or you can pick tags from several bundles. Up to you!

Our tag bundles:

• alsoavl= will let you search for any fics whose masterpost/story header contained a link to a podfic/audiobook or an eReader format when we tagged it
• artist= represents artists! Works same as writers, below.
  
• w= represents writers. Writers will be broken down by authors' initial letter. For example, if you're looking for recommended stories by kroki_refur then go to authors I-L and look for her there.
• authorsite: - if an author writes so much Sam h/c or Jared h/c that someone recommended their master fic list, this is where you'll find those links.
• fandom=SPN, RPF, AU, non-AU: here is where you indicate if you only want SPN or RPF. If you want to limit your search to AUs, also pick AU, as well as SPN or RPF.
  Note 1: RPF in this case doesn't define a story as gen. It's just any flavor of Real Person Fiction here.
  Note 2: AU! AU vs non-AU is pretty clear-cut in RPF, so we'll try to label each RPF fic as AU or non-AU. But SPN is much more complicated - with alternative timelines and alternate universes and time travel and future stories being canon! So we've decided (arbitrarily) to only label an SPN fic 'AU' if it's so AU that it's not the story of two monster-hunting brothers who were raised by their dad after their mom was killed by a demon. What does this mean to you? If you want that kind of obviously AU SPN fic, pick the SPN and AU tags. We aren't planning to use a non-AU tag for SPN. If don't want AU, you would just pick SPN, and you'll get all SPN that meet your other criteria. You'll want to look at the tags of the stories returned to see if any were labeled AU. (We didn't want to try to label all the SPN fics as non-AU when AU is such a moving target!)
• genre=gen, het, slash: here is where you indicate if you only want gen or het or slash. If you don't care, don't pick one and then ALL fics that meet your other criteria will be returned, regardless of this category.
• pairing:: if a reccer or story header gave us a pairing, it's here. You can select by it, or not.
• rating=: if a reccer or story header gave us a rating, it's here. You can select by it, or not.



• theme= is where you want to go if you want to limit your search to injury or illness or psychological trauma or abuse or wee!Sam or other.
• h= is the kinf of hurt! Go here if you're wanting to click on brokenlimb, for example. You don't have to pick theme. But if there are coma!fics due to illness and coma!fics due to injury, and you only want the comas due to injury, then you would pick injury from the theme bundle and coma from the type of hurt bundle.



• when=: this applies to SPN fics. If a story is set in a particular point in time, and the reccer or story header made that clear, you can search by it. This is where you can look for episode codas or missing scenes, or just satisfy your craving for a season 3 fic, or explore futurefics. Or don't select it at all! (But remember, a story could be set in season 1 and if the story header didn't say that and the reccer didn't say that, it won't come up in a search for season 1.)
• what= what kind of fic. This is an tag for miscellaneous fic qualities that were brought to the tagger's attention in the rec or story header. Some examples are case.fic, mpreg.fic, outsiders.POV, sequel, verse, etc. You can search by these, too. Just remember, if the tagger didn't know it was a case.fic, then a fic won't have that tag, even if it was a case.fic. So if you want to search by a what= tag, you will get some fic that matches, but there may be other stories that would qualify, too, that just weren't tagged that way.
• wc= can give you word count range. When available, we've set things up so you can search by word count if you want to.

Notes
The summary for each story generally comes from the info provided by the author in the story header. For that matter, pretty much everything in the collection comes from what was provided by the reccer and the author - with the tagger's best guess when things are a little vague. (For example, what do we do if the story header said it was pre-slash? We might call it both gen and slash. That way it will come up on a gen search, because it's safe for gen readers, but it will also come up on a slash search, because slash readers might find it to their tastes. It's not a perfect system. We do the best we can!)

When you get your results, you'll see all the tags for each story returned, not just the ones you searched by. So maybe you didn't pick a rating tag, but you decide you DO want an NC17 fic, or you DON'T want an NC17 fic. That information will be shown to you in the story tags if it was in the story header, and you can decide whether to read the story or not. If the reccer on spn_littlebro warned that the story contained underage (sex) or no.happy.ending, then you'll see a what= tag with that info listed with that story's tags and you can decide whether to click or not.

And FYI: Next to each entry there's a little blue box. That tells you how many people have bookmarked the fic in delicious before. The bigger the number, the more popular it is (in delicious).

Here are some search examples:

Example A: you want amnesia!fic. That's it. Any and all amnesia fic! Just expand types of hurt remember h= stands for type of hurt, so scroll down to h= and pick amnesia. And - Voilà!

Example B: you want some hurt!Jared with injury. That's all. You figure you can scan whatever comes back from that simple request and decide if a given result sounds appealing, without messing with a lot of tags and bundles. No problem. Go to the fandom= bundle that shows RPF and pick RPF. (If you only want RPF AU then pick both RPF and AU.) And then go to the theme= bundle and pick Injury. And - Voilà!

Example C: you're in the mood for a long SPN futurefic, but you don't know if there are any. You know everything in this collection has hurt!Sam or hurt!Jared, so you don't even care to filter it down further by hurt. Go to the fandom= bundle that shows SPN and pick that. Go to the when= bundle and pick future. Go to the wc= bundle and pick 20K+. And - Voilà!

If you send your search, and after looking at the results, want to filter it further, just pick another tag from the tag bundles. delicious will remember what your other selected tags are, and will reduce the findings to the ones you just filtered on. (Say you forgot to say you wanted slash only. Just go back and find and pick slash.)

All the tags you're currently searching on are shown in a toolbar along the top. If you decide to re-run the search but want to ignore one of the tags you'd picked before, just click the X beside it! That will drop the one you don't want to search by, and keep the other(s) you still want or just added.

Delicious actually does the search iteratively. You pick a tag and while you're deciding if you want to pick another tag, it starts filtering the collection to return what you asked for. Then you add another tag and it filters this new list down. (In fact, after you enter each tag, you can see in the tags to the right what other tags are still available. For example, if you search for SPN, you might see a Sam/Castiel pairing available. If you next choose to filter by word count 20K+, the Sam/Castiel pairing will disappear from your choices if there are no fics in the collection that are Sam/Castiel and over 20K.)

Play around with it! It's fun!

If you have questions, feel free to comment here and we'll try to answer them!

If you have found an entry in our delicious collection that is tagged incorrectly (maybe we had a typo and ended up with the wrong pairing or word count, for example), you can go here to let us know.