Search engine...

[David Bailey]

Whilst I have been amazed, astonished and impressed by the high level of usability of this forum (and tech support Franck), the search engine is a bit, technically speaking, iffy.

It's fast, which is of course good, but there are a couple of niggles:

1. Doesn't default to wildcard matching:
So, for example, before posting my wonderful "Competitions: why bother" thread, I searched on "competition". Didn't see anything, thought "Oh good, a new topic!", and posted.
However, had I searched on "competitions" instead, I'd have found out that this has been discussed to death, or at least to coma, and I'd have revived the old one or not posted. In other words, a search on "competition" doesn't automatically also search on "competitions", which I'd expect to happen on most searches.

2. Doesn't take you to the exact post
When looking for a term, I get directed to a thread, not a post - it makes it difficult to find "the one where DavidB said XXX", for example, in a 20-page thread. OK, the terms are highlighted, but you still need to scan through them all to find the post you want. Is there any way of going to a single post if that search term only occurs once in a thread?

Any chance of looking at these? It might help stop dumbos like me coming along and posting done-to-death topics...

[ducasi]

Hi,

While I'm not Franck , I occasionally admin a couple of these forums thingies elsewhere, so might be able to help...

Originally Posted by DavidJames

1. Doesn't default to wildcard matching:

Until recently, not even google did this. But you can use explicit wildcards, and, e.g., search for "compet*" which should find all the variations of the word.

Originally Posted by DavidJames

2. Doesn't take you to the exact post

By going into "Advanced search" you can specify you want to see the results as posts rather than threads, and then you should be able to save this preference to always search by posts.

I imagine that both problems could be solved by a little hacking of the source code, but I'm not sure I'd want to get into that.

I'm not especially hands-on with my forums, meaning I don't know them inside-out, so I could easily be missing something crucial here.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by ducasi

Until recently, not even google did this.

weird - our corporate intranet does this by default, but, oops, our website doesn't, I'll have to fix that...

Originally Posted by ducasi

By going into "Advanced search" you can specify you want to see the results as posts rather than threads, and then you should be able to save this preference to always search by posts.

Oops - didn't see that. Thanks for the Top Tip.