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I was trying to find an answer (posted by a user) to a question of mine that I had asked a long time ago. For some reason, I couldn't even remember what the question was. I wanted to look at a specific line in that answer which had made a lot of sense to me back then - I wanted to use that today and take some ideas from it.

I looked for it for an hour going through each of the questions I had asked here in ELL SE. I skimmed through all of the answers to many of my questions. Then I remembered I had asked the question in ELU. Fortunately, I had asked just 5 questions in ELU and it was thus easy to find the post I was looking for.

I have asked only 50 questions here in ELL, and I was thinking this was such a tiring thing to do - searching through 50 questions. Now that I think about it, I can't imagine how difficult it would be to search through thousands of questions/answers/posts for people who have 10K+ reputation. Surely, they have much, much more to look into or search from.

Is there a way we can search for our own questions/answers in our account with keywords? If we enter keywords in the general search bar, we can see all relevant questions which have those words, but the questions are from all the users in ELL.

Is there a secondary search bar which only looks for the keywords in our own account and then gives us the relevant question/answer? Also, this personal search bar could be used to find a specific question/answer in another user's account. This would be done by going to the user's account, and entering certain keywords in their search bar to find the required question/answer posted by them.

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Is there a way we can search for our own questions/answers in our account with keywords?

If I understand correctly, yes! If I want to search my posts and look for posts in which I wrote "dog", then I can search user:mine or user:me and the keyword:

user:me dog

I search that and I get 6 results at this time.

For you, I would need your user ID. I can find that by clicking on your profile (on a desktop browser, I'm not sure about the app) and it should be populated in the search bar. Note that your user ID will (likely) be different on each SE community you belong to.

I searched

user:77766 government

and I got 11 results. This includes questions and answers. If I want to search your answers, then I can use is:answer or is:a:

user:77766 is:answer government

I get back 1 result.

It's really nice now because, at least for me on Firefox and on the desktop browser, the tips drop down automatically. I think that was implemented (somewhat) recently. I took a look at the app, and the tips did not drop down for me.

Anyway, the drop down list provides a few tips. You can find more tips here: How do I search?

I found a related post/duplicate here: Search function — where is it?

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  • Ahh, I had no idea this was possible. I did not even know I was 77766. Thanks very much Em.
    – AIQ
    Oct 3, 2019 at 5:31
  • No problem. I forgot to explain how to find that ID. I've included that now, though there might be other ways.
    – Em. Mod
    Oct 3, 2019 at 5:40
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    Instead of looking up your own user id, you can search for user:me.
    – user230
    Oct 3, 2019 at 6:28
  • There are also some searching tips in the Contributors Guide: ell.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4883/9161
    – ColleenV
    Oct 7, 2019 at 18:32

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