Joined Dec 2007
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Forum Thread
Keywords for Deal Alerts formatting
March 20, 2025 at
08:37 PM
Just wonder how the keyword search in the Deal Alerts work.
Do keywords need to be delimited by some character?
Is the behavior it will search each keyword independently, or does it search the whole string? For instance, if my keywords are "adobe, lightroom, creative cloud", 6 results appear in the global search. If I just do "lightroom", 14 results appear. So I suspect delimiting values doesn't have my intended behavior, so it might be best to have 3 separate deal alerts with one keyword each?
Do keywords need to be delimited by some character?
Is the behavior it will search each keyword independently, or does it search the whole string? For instance, if my keywords are "adobe, lightroom, creative cloud", 6 results appear in the global search. If I just do "lightroom", 14 results appear. So I suspect delimiting values doesn't have my intended behavior, so it might be best to have 3 separate deal alerts with one keyword each?
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Do keywords need to be delimited by some character?
Is the behavior it will search each keyword independently, or does it search the whole string? For instance, if my keywords are "adobe, lightroom, creative cloud", 6 results appear in the global search. If I just do "lightroom", 14 results appear. So I suspect delimiting values doesn't have my intended behavior, so it might be best to have 3 separate deal alerts with one keyword each?
https://slickdeals.net/forums/showpost.php?p=
as you'll see in Shorted's guide, the use of "OR" ( | ) is the best way to consolidate terms into a single da if you want it to hit each term individually
Do keywords need to be delimited by some character?
Is the behavior it will search each keyword independently, or does it search the whole string? For instance, if my keywords are "adobe, lightroom, creative cloud", 6 results appear in the global search. If I just do "lightroom", 14 results appear. So I suspect delimiting values doesn't have my intended behavior, so it might be best to have 3 separate deal alerts with one keyword each?
So the way alerts work is if you put adobe lightroom creative cloud all in one keyword (without any 'delimiters'), it treats it as an AND search. adobe AND lightroom AND creative AND cloud
If you want an either/or type keyword, it would be as acesmuzic said, you'd use the | pipe symbol to turn it into an OR search: adobe|lightroom|"creative cloud" which would find any or all of those if they're in the OP's post.
By default, all words entered into the keyword field will be treated as an AND search, unless you the 'delimiters'. So if you want this OR that, then use the | pipe symbol. And any term that includes two or more words as a phrase, or special characters such as an apostrophe, must be in quotes if using the | pipe symbol because if they're not enclosed in quotes then the pipe symbol will only look for the word that's directly attached to the OR | pipe itself.
Example: adobe|lightroom|creative cloud (w/o quotes around the creative cloud phrase) would find this:
adobe AND cloud
or
lighroom AND cloud
or
creative AND cloud
(or all 4 of the words)
but using the quotes around the phrase creative could would just find those 3 specific ones you wanted: adobe or lightroom or "creative cloud"
If this helps, here's the original SD Deal Alert FAQ page that went poof on one of the deal alert changes years ago. So this is via the wayback machine
https://web.archive.org/web/20140123035132/https://slickdeals.net/forums/faq.php?faq=sd_
if that link doesn't work, copy/paste this:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140123035132/https://slickdeals.net/forums/faq.php?faq=sd_faq_item#faq_deal_alerts_faq