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inbookmarks:mine was fixed for searching within a particular Stack Exchange site, but often I find myself wanting to search for a question I favorited/bookmarked, but not remembering which site it was on when it could conceivably have been on a number of different sites.

On the cross-site search at https://stackexchange.com/search it does not work, presumably because we have different user ids on each site. Is there a way it could be made to work?

Note that this request is for searching, not just viewing, so it's not a duplicate of View "cross-site" favorites?. Just viewing is not very helpful when you have a huge volume of bookmarks across Stack Exchange sites.

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    The SE somehow doesn't want to unify their databases on reasons I can't understand. They have the SO database with 10-20million questions, and they have around 350 other whose combined size is around a third of that. However, the search doesn't happen with the microsoft SQL db they are using, it happens with an elastic search engine. Probably it wouldn't be hard to fill it with all the databases they have. However, in their decisions and behavior I see a clear tendency that they want to separate their sites as it is only possible, I don't know why is it so.
    – peterh
    Sep 3, 2018 at 7:06
  • In principle it could just iterate over all 350 (or the subset you have linked accounts on) and aggregate the results.
    – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
    Sep 3, 2018 at 7:23
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    You might try the SEDE ( data.stackexchange.com ), it is not very hard to implement cross-database queries, I have a lot. The main problem that you (and me) are good linuxers and we would need to use ms sql for that, it caused serious conscience problems for me, but in the case of the SE I made an exception.
    – peterh
    Sep 3, 2018 at 7:29
  • @peterh: Thanks for the tip. It's beyond what I want to do right now - I was just trying to cite one question I had favorited to reference in an answer I wanted to write and couldn't find it, but the topic wasn't really one that justifies spending a lot of my time on it. But it might be worth doing in the future when I really have a need for an elusive favorite.
    – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
    Sep 3, 2018 at 15:31
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    Almost two years ... I wish this would've gained more attention, because I often forget on which page I saw the question that I marked as favorite.
    – Martin Braun
    Jul 13, 2020 at 22:35

1 Answer 1

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It's possible (sort of) with a SEDE query, if you don't mind the results will be up-to-date up to last Sunday. Given that you're often searching for questions you bookmarked long ago, this shouldn't be much of a problem.

The query needs your network account ID, which is the number that appears in the address bar if you navigate to https://stackexchange.com/users/current.

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  • Not bad, it even searches through the body of the questions like the regular search engine, it will need some monitoring in the future for upcoming StackExchange pages, though. Still loving it, especially because you delivered fast.
    – Martin Braun
    Jul 14, 2020 at 8:50
  • Thanks! I have a template for networkwide searching, so it was rather easy to adapt it to this particular case. It's probably even possible to tweak it further by splitting the query into separate words, but I've never been good at those kind of things. Anyway, it will never obtain the full search functionality.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Jul 14, 2020 at 8:54
  • Great. I didn't consider to try more than one word. So yes, it's not a perfect solution, but it helps a lot to filter and find the question someone seeks, eventually.
    – Martin Braun
    Jul 14, 2020 at 9:00

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