I think your forum search funtion needs work.

squintz

Pirate Lord
I believe your forum search function needs some looking at.
Its filtering system or mechanics are too broad and it mostly fails as a useful modern search engine. It's far too simplistic and omits 90 percent of the words and looks to me to be acceptable because the search function application has such little load on the servers. Personally, I don't think that's a viable reason to make people struggle with a search or just give up because it returns pages of no matches.

If I input "where are the log files" the engine should not arbitrarily drop off almost all the words in the inquiry. It actually ignores log, where, are, the...

That makes this very useless. The returns are all over the map and meaninglessly numerous.

Please, could some one look into this problem and see if there is a solution, because as the search function is now, it is mostly a waste of time.

Yes, we have time right now, but this has been since I've started 3 years ago. And even though I'm sitting on my butt, I have better things to do than grind through 10's of pages of a search return if I was trying to help someone on a thread and needed a link to a informative staff post. The staff has done a very nice job with the forums but leaving the search function as nothing more than a token clicker seems below the quality that the staff is striving for.

Thank you for reading.
Stay safe.
 
The functional purpose of search is to iterate through all the indexed forum posts for the specified "keywords". Putting an entire phrase together, it splits it into individual parts, as keywords. So when you use "what", "are", you're going to get a broad variety of results rather than just searching "log files" or "logs"

Definition of a Keyword: a word or concept of great significance.
 
The functional purpose of search is to iterate through all the indexed forum posts for the specified "keywords". Putting an entire phrase together, it splits it into individual parts, as keywords. So when you use "what", "are", you're going to get a broad variety of results rather than just searching "log files" or "logs"

Definition of a Keyword: a word or concept of great significance.
Not really. The results of this forums search with one word or phrase are identical and needlessly broad. It's not practical. Not allowing phrases creates more unmatched results. If I was looking for a specific word, fine. But most people aren't looking for individual words in a forum, but specific phrases or threads via an idea. These are two different kinds of searches. Educational searches use whole phrases to capture more specific search for ideas or concepts. Single word searches gives massive non matching data. Forums that use more advanced search algorithms return less garbage.
Search engines like google shorten this because of the volume it has and also google wants to load your first ten pages of paid sponsored links like it does now. Think google dorks, which ironically google has tried to suppress, mostly because when you dork, you bypass almost all the paid advertising and sponsors randomly shoved at you by google and only get returns specifically to your inquiry.

Tlopo isn't google and doesn't need to use that type of programming.
 
The forum search is fairly limited due to the underlying technology (MySQL full-text). There's not really a whole lot that can be done about it without switching the engine. The only other viable engine is Elasticsearch, which is rather RAM hungry for our shoestring budget.

Things to be aware of for better searches:
  • Words must be 4 characters or more or they are automatically excluded
  • Words must not be "stop words" (the/or/and/are etc) or they are automatically excluded
  • You can prefix a word with + to say it must be present in the results
  • You can prefix a word with - to say it must not be present in the results
  • You can use wildcards to search variations (run* will match running, for example)
  • You can surround a phrase with "double quotes" to search for the exact phrase
If that's too complicated or cumbersome, use Google with a site: modifier.
 
The forum search is fairly limited due to the underlying technology (MySQL full-text). There's not really a whole lot that can be done about it without switching the engine. The only other viable engine is Elasticsearch, which is rather RAM hungry for our shoestring budget.

Things to be aware of for better searches:
  • Words must be 4 characters or more or they are automatically excluded
  • Words must not be "stop words" (the/or/and/are etc) or they are automatically excluded
  • You can prefix a word with + to say it must be present in the results
  • You can prefix a word with - to say it must not be present in the results
  • You can use wildcards to search variations (run* will match running, for example)
  • You can surround a phrase with "double quotes" to search for the exact phrase
If that's too complicated or cumbersome, use Google with a site: modifier.
This was a credited response that gave more information than I ever could find on the wiki or in tlopo forum info. Unless I didn't conduct that search properly as well when trying to find forum use data. This post will be copied and saved for references from here on out.

Thank you very much.
 
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