Search capabilties and a tutorial

[polo_pro]

I may not be utilizing the search feature correctly, but I find it quite frustrating. Quite often I have a few keywords that'd quickly lead to the past thread with the information I want. But if I type both keywords into the search function, it comes back with any thread that has one of the keywords. For those of you who are technical, that's an "OR" instead of the "AND" that I wanted.

I've tried typing "AND" between each of the keywords with no success.

So I'd like to petition the site maintainer to see if there's a better search plugin for this forum software.

Also, if I'm off in the weeds and missing some obvious capability of the search feature to do what I want, I'd suggest that a tutorial be stickied (perhaps on this board) demonstrating how to do a complicated search. I'm assuming it might be a multistep activity where you limit the search space with one term and then iterate again with another term to shrink the search space more. Thus getting the desired "AND"ing. (bystander...that's your cue 8^) 8^) 8^))

[bystander]

I may not be utilizing the search feature correctly, but I find it quite frustrating. Quite often I have a few keywords that'd quickly lead to the past thread with the information I want. But if I type both keywords into the search function, it comes back with any thread that has one of the keywords. For those of you who are technical, that's an "OR" instead of the "AND" that I wanted.

I've tried typing "AND" between each of the keywords with no success.

So I'd like to petition the site maintainer to see if there's a better search plugin for this forum software.

Also, if I'm off in the weeds and missing some obvious capability of the search feature to do what I want, I'd suggest that a tutorial be stickied (perhaps on this board) demonstrating how to do a complicated search. I'm assuming it might be a multistep activity where you limit the search space with one term and then iterate again with another term to shrink the search space more. Thus getting the desired "AND"ing. (bystander...that's your cue 8^) 8^) 8^))I haven't once tried the word "AND" in a search here on Segwaychat. Wouldn't expect it to work the way you are expecting. Plus "AND" is a three letter word, and we know the current search feature ignores 1, 2, & 3 letter words - a feature I find annoying, which contributes (among other things) to get me to use google for some searches.

One thing that's not obvious about the search here is that it doesn't seem to respond well to phrases in quotes, as google would. Google not only reponds to phrases in quotes, but if you look above the results, you'll find the (not insignifigant) words listed individually with links.

For example, if I search for "off in the weeds" (quotes included), the "sorry - no matches" message is displayed. If I search for "off in the weeds" (quotes not included), along with a message about un-importance of the words "off", "in", and "the", plomoh's post is at the top of the list, along with posts about the tv show on showtime.

I happen to think that the words "off", "in", and "the" are extremely important for finding the phrase "off in the weeds", as it makes it extremely easy to find this particular post . But I am not the search engine, I am just somebody trying to find things. So I have to make do with the tools at hand.

Another un-obvious thing is that the Segwaychat search only seems to search threads not archived. I suppose old threads are archived to make the site run more smoothly, but when scrounging up something really old, I usually use google's advance search, with the site restricted to segwaychat.com.

The built in search on Segwaychat is useful for some things, but has it's limitations. Florin came up with a link to the vBulletin manual once, here it is:

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/

Looks like there are some admin-settable options for searching. But altering those options can have a huge impact on server load as the database index filesize may be severely increased.

The things I have a tough time searching for is when I remember something about a post, but it turns out to be a follow-up to another thread instead of a thread starting post. Another tough search is when the OP has misspelled the word I am searching for (or used a similar or related term), and I haven't a clue what I should be searching for until I have actually found it. Google often helps, sometimes I have to resort to some lateral thinking to finally find what I think I am looking for.

I got used to using google on the old board's software, as that search feature would usually time out and crash on anything but the simplest searches. So despite it's limitations, the vBulletin search feature is an improvement.

The disadvantage to using google is that it may not have the recently posted stuff in it's database yet. Lately, I've been having good results with the vBulletin search when looking for things a few weeks old. For really old stuff, over a couple of years, I end up trying google after not finding things with the vBulletin search.

Another advantage to the vBulletin search is that you can search by poster if you happen to remember it. Google just looks at words on a page, so if the poster is mentioned in passing, it will also give a search hit.