Why is the forum search engine so weird?

[ahsonmonis]

I do not understand whether I am doing something wrong or the forum search engine is really bad.

I mean, after I have posted this thread. I will go and search the exact subject in the search engine and weird topics will appear and I would be lucky to get this thread, let alone get it in the top 5 hits. Can someone explain. Maybe I am doing something really stupid...

[Zren]

Boolean logic. Your search is actually for

Why OR is OR the OR forum OR search OR engine OR so OR weird?

So the results will turn up anything with these results. I'm pretty sure it'll sort the result in order by Announcements, Stickies, Normal Posts. Then sort them by accuracy to the search terms.

The main reason is the Announcements and stickies. Once you get past those your's is at the top of the list.

If you want Why AND is AND the ...
Click the "Search for All Terms" option under the search box.

[Tony]

We found that the build in forum search has gone to hell once we got past a certain size; both in terms of relevance and performance.

That's why we have the Google search bar at the bottom of the search page. It finds your post by title as the first result.

[Dan]

The built in search function can be a bit slow and is nothing compared to google, however zren is correct that in this case it has to do with not clicking "Search for All Terms"

By default the search, trys to find posts with all the words matching but not nessarly in that order or in a row. If you check "Search for All Terms" yours is the only post shown.

You can also check "Search message subject only" to only search for the title of a post. In witch case your post comes up first.

Also words that are very small like "so", is", and "the" are droped from the search.

[md]

So when will the search work for finding all posts by people with two letter usernames?

[apomb]

using regular expressions!

Perl:

if($string =~ m/(M/m) (D|d)/)   {print "posts by md\n"}

[BigBear]

I enjoy the Topic Starter Option. Everyone should search themselves in Turing Help and see their first couple posts