David
02-12-2012, 08:34 PM
Due the increasing size of the forums, I made changes to the forums' search engine today.
Here are some notes to help you get the most out of it.
-- The maximum number of results returned is now 100. It used to be 300.
-- The search engine now has a boolean capability. The default operator is OR.
Examples:
leonardtown ford
is equivalent to: leonardtown or ford
If you want posts with both terms, you should specify AND: leonardtown and ford
-- You can use NOT
Example: If you want a post that includes "leonardtown" but NOT "ford". use:
leonardtown and not ford
Note: this does not seem to work against the thread title unless you use the option "Search Titles Only"
-- I recommend using Advanced search, then select POSTS under the "Show Results as" option. Otherwise you may get a thread with 100+ posts in it and only one post has the terms you are searching for. Then you'll have to go on a manual hunt to find the post you are looking for.
-- To find an exact phrase, put quotes around it.
Example: To find leonardtown and ford right next to each other in the post, use: "leonardtown ford"
-- Words with 1 or 2 characters are not indexed. So, searching for "a" "at" or "be" or "v4" is a waste of time.
-- There are STOPWORDS. STOPWORDS is a list of words the search engine does not index because they are too common. Typically things like grammatical articles (a the) or prepositions (of at by) are not indexed. We use the standard mySQL v5.0 STOPLIST at the moment.
-- Abbreviations. You should be able to precede a keyword with "+" to indicate AND and "-" to indicate not.
Example: +leonardtown -ford
should be the same as leonardtown and not ford.
You can have multiple keywords:
+leonardtown +ford -chevy
again, if you are using "Search Entire Posts" instead of "Search Titles Only," the NOT does not seem to work against text found in the thread's title, only the post's text.
Here are some notes to help you get the most out of it.
-- The maximum number of results returned is now 100. It used to be 300.
-- The search engine now has a boolean capability. The default operator is OR.
Examples:
leonardtown ford
is equivalent to: leonardtown or ford
If you want posts with both terms, you should specify AND: leonardtown and ford
-- You can use NOT
Example: If you want a post that includes "leonardtown" but NOT "ford". use:
leonardtown and not ford
Note: this does not seem to work against the thread title unless you use the option "Search Titles Only"
-- I recommend using Advanced search, then select POSTS under the "Show Results as" option. Otherwise you may get a thread with 100+ posts in it and only one post has the terms you are searching for. Then you'll have to go on a manual hunt to find the post you are looking for.
-- To find an exact phrase, put quotes around it.
Example: To find leonardtown and ford right next to each other in the post, use: "leonardtown ford"
-- Words with 1 or 2 characters are not indexed. So, searching for "a" "at" or "be" or "v4" is a waste of time.
-- There are STOPWORDS. STOPWORDS is a list of words the search engine does not index because they are too common. Typically things like grammatical articles (a the) or prepositions (of at by) are not indexed. We use the standard mySQL v5.0 STOPLIST at the moment.
-- Abbreviations. You should be able to precede a keyword with "+" to indicate AND and "-" to indicate not.
Example: +leonardtown -ford
should be the same as leonardtown and not ford.
You can have multiple keywords:
+leonardtown +ford -chevy
again, if you are using "Search Entire Posts" instead of "Search Titles Only," the NOT does not seem to work against text found in the thread's title, only the post's text.