Search?

A

agent006

Member
Is there any way to enable searching using all entered terms? For instance i've just tried searching for "tdi poor mpg" and it returns every thread with either tdi, poor, or MPG in it. So fairly good for finding every second thread posted but not much use for finding out why i'm only getting 42mpg.

The usual quotes and plusses don't have much effect. Is there a setting that can be enabled for this?
 
I would probably have said yes. when was it last serviced?(fuel filter)?, did it gradually go down or did it just say 1 tank 55 then the next tank 42 ?

Cheers Phil
 
Agent, I think a PM directly to Ben our webmaster and co-owner, would be your best bet in getting the search criteria you need.

Cheers,

Mike
 
Hi,

The problem here is that 3 character words weren't being indexed (two of your search terms) - this is the default behaviour in the database system we use. I've modified it to index 3 character words and rebuilt the search indexes. You should now be able to do a search from the advanced search page such as:

tdi poor mpg

That returns a more respectable 17 posts. Note also for exact matches use double quotes around the expression. e.g:

"The Future of Motorsport"

returns 1 result, whereas:

The Future of Motorport

Returns more. Note also that 'stop words' such as 'the' and 'of' are ignored in non-exact matches.

The downside to indexing these short words is that they are typically frequently used in forum posts - so you might actually see more results for some searches. (e.g. search for mpg and you have hundreds of results)...

Ben
 
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we've added specific words to our database... because we have about ten times the number of posts, adding three letters is going to break things. Google is an extremely good way around.

Bret
 
bretti_kivi said:
we've added specific words to our database... because we have about ten times the number of posts, adding three letters is going to break things. Google is an extremely good way around.
Click to expand...

We actually have a Google Search Appliance with a £40K licence sitting next to our server - perhaps I'll see if I can use that for our little site!

I'll see what kind of response we get on the 3 char indexing. We could add some commonly occurring words as stop words - but the default is reasonably comprehensive (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-stopwords.html) - and the example of 'tdi poor mpg' seems to be returning a better set of results now than before.

Ben
 
ben said:
You should now be able to do a search from the advanced search page such as:

tdi poor mpg

That returns a more respectable 17 posts.
Click to expand...

I'm obviously doing something wrong. With or without quotes i'm getting 499 results for that search.
 
That's odd. I'm definately only seeing 17. Try searching again in case it was a cached page.
 
Hi Gary,

Would you put up a post of what you are typing in so we can try it on our own PCs?

Thanks,

John.
 
Just tried the drop down search box, typed in tdi poor mpg selected show threads or show posts and clicked go...........and got the same as Ben - 17 threads or 27 posts

Cheers Spike
 
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Thanks for the input guys. I dunno what to suggest. I've always found the search function difficult. Most things i search seems return hundreds of results. Thought the quote marks might have cured it but no such luck. I wonder if theres a cache somewhere or a setting in the user profile. Perhaps ben could advise i've tried the otherone entitled the future of motorsport and i get lots of returns on that too.

Gary
 
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