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I'd like to search for a word that was edited out of one of my questions. I don't know which question. How can one search for a word that was removed during an edit? (Input: word; output: list of questions where one edit has removed that word).

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    Via SEDE? The site? Any means?
    – VLAZ
    Commented Jul 9 at 19:02
  • @VLAZ any means ok. Commented Jul 9 at 19:02
  • Do you know which site or would this need to be a network-wide search? Commented Jul 9 at 19:03
  • @HenryEcker ideally network-wide search (but one site is already a good start). Commented Jul 9 at 19:05

1 Answer 1

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I wrote a SEDE query for a similar case a while ago - note that

  • it only checks for edits by other users (I assume you're OK with that; otherwise it's trivial* to change that)
  • it's not limited to posts by a specific user (not really hard to change either - if it's a fairly specific word (not 'thanks'), I don't expect you'd have that many false positives)
  • if the word is still present elsewhere in the post, the query won't detect such posts (the query would need some kind of counting mechanism to address that)

The usual SEDE caveats apply: it's only up to date until last Sunday morning. I hope your medium-term memory is better than mine and lasts at least a full week :)

*: if your SQL skills are at least 5% of @rene's

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    works great, thanks! (can't upvote your other answer, already upvoted a while back, then forgotten...) Note that it times out on SO. FR: Increase max SEDE query running time Commented Jul 9 at 19:46
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    I'm not sure if this query was ever running successfully on SO - it was addressed to a Meta.SE situation. I'll have a look when I have more time again :)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Jul 9 at 19:59

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