Add your tips here, and in a couple of weeks I'll compile them into one post with search tips.

Thanks!

Pam

Thank you Pam!

It has been helpfull to me when I remember some pertinent search words AND the member Name. I always click the match exact name check box. This seems to narrow the search down by a fair amount.

It won't let me search for my posts since I have only a 2 letter name. Any suggestions?

I can search my posts and look at my name....

I have never had much luck using the search feature, hopefully that'll change with the new board. But then I'm slow...so slow I make frozen molasses look like greased lightning!

I just don't think that asterisk is accurate. "apple*" searches for just that phrase including the asterisk, not words that start with apple. Try it and see. I had a lot of frustration with two letter acronyms (BK, GM, etc) after the site switch. I finally found that I could use the % sign as the wildcard for those.

So when you compile the tips, make sure to specify how two letter acronyms should be searched.

This doesn't work for me: GM* and Household

This DOES work for me: GM% and Household

-LB

See, that's the kind of thing I'm looking for. What I put was taken directly from the search help files, but I'd noticed that the asterisk wasn't working for some people. That's the reason for this thread

when I type:

+credit +report

I get an error message.

"credit report" works fine for me, no problems.

A thought on that, I'm pretty sure "credit report" searches for that phrase. If you type "credit and report", it searches for both words, but not necessarily as part of the phrase. That was another source of frustration until I realized it.

I still am not sure how to do NOT type searches. Does anyone? "credit and not report" doesn't do what I thought it would, and the - syntax doesn't work either.

-LB

FYI, including a % sign in your search really does nothing. The search php code strips the % sign specifically, but adds it again in the actual SQL query.




I am not really seeing anything in the code to provide for + or - signs.

If you want to search all your own posts (i.e., if you are looking to see if anyone has replied to any of your posts), you can go to the Search section, type your name in under member name field, check match exact name only, and then search with no keywords.

If you want to see all new posts since your last visit, click the "View new posts" link (as if that wasn't obvious).

If you want to search keywords on a page, just add to the address bar "&hl=keyword" at the end of the present url. This will highlight all instances of "keyword" on the page. (Note, until the server is on php5, and IPB is coded for php5, this is case sensitive and thus Credit and credit are not the same thing. They will match in a search, but wouldn't be highlighted by this example).

To the admins: if it hasn't been done already, if you FULLTEXT index the posts in your ibf_posts table, and set IPB to use FULLTEXT in the ACP, this will make searching the forums a LOT quicker. On a site like this, with a DB size likely to be around 60-80 MB or larger, you would likely need to FULLTEXT index from command line, through SSH/shell access. But if someone COULD do this, would be a great improvement on the searching system, probably the best thing you could do to it behind the curtains.

I'd have to argue that point. Maybe it doesn't get included in the search, but to say it does nothing is not true. The site limits search words shorter than three characters. So if you want to have a search that includes a two character acronym (BK, GM, PG, etc.), you need to pad it out to three chars. The percent sign works for this.

If there is a better way to force a search on two letter acronyms, please fill me in.

-LB

60-80MB or larger? Ummm that might hold half of our member table. Or a drop in the bucket of the post table.

We've thought about doing the FULTEXT but you're right it would have to be done from the command line. And we would likely have to take the board down for several hours while we did it. We've got a few other bugs we'd like to work out first before doing so.

@lbjones....hmm, that's very interesting.
I don't test many of the abilities, quirks, etc., so I'll take your word for it.

But the php code IPB uses for searching actually strips the % sign long before it checks the character length, so I should think that this "trick" wouldn't work. If it does though, hey, that would be a valuable search tip if you ask me. I was mostly pointing out that adding a % to indicate a wildcard isn't necessary, as IPB strips it and then re-adds it as necessary afterwards.

@Pam...wow, this site must be a lot larger than I gauged at first. Let's do some figuring really quickly:

You have about 12,000 members.
(I joined a week or two ago).

My hobby site (bfarber.com) had 26,385.

I have 36,441 posts. Your site I'm guessing has many more, as it is more geared towards discussions.

I was giving a rough guess of the DB size. I'd be pretty interested in knowing the actual size if 60-80MB is that far off. My DB size is 120 MB (site uses approx 1.8 GB of webspace), so I was basing my estimate off of what I had seen in the past. In any event, no worries. Curiousity tends to get the better of me sometimes.

And the reason you posted is exactly the reason I haven't fulltext indexed my db too. lol

As of five minutes ago:



Our database (unzipped) is more than 1.5GB. You can imagine how long it took to convert all the posts when we moved from phpBB2 to IPB. I can only imagine that fulltext indexing would be just as painful.

>.<

Wow, yeah those posts really do drive the db size up.
I can only imagine your hosting costs.
Thanks for humoring me.

LOL, sure

And our hosting costs are beyond reasonable. we've really lucked out - excellent support and a price that can't be beat - we've looked, everyone else wants more. We eat a lot of bandwidth, too.

Yeah, I hear you.
My site was getting up to about 200GB bandwidth a month, but it is primarily an upload/download site.
I sold it recently (at a pretty nice penny too), and only admin it now, but still enjoy being there.

And I don't know WHY you switched exactly from phpbb to IPB, but I'm glad you did. In my opinion, IPB has been the best forum software I've used to date.

We've been more than impressed with IPB.

We switched because phpBB simply can't handle the volume and size that we are. It started "eating" things and overwhelming the SQL server with inefficient code. The load on the SQL server was reduced dramatically when we switched to IPB.

When trying to search for something such as 'repo' I come up with repo, reporting, report, repossession... how do I get it to only find repo? Not variations of the word I type in? Quotes dont' seem to work. Thanks!

I adore this board but I am VERY frustrated with the search function. I can never get it to work, even while following the different rules and tips in this thread. I don't like posting questions I know can be easily searched for and found and I see (all the time), people replying to questions with "do a search" or "did you do a search". I would love to do searches all day long and not bother people with my newbie questions, but I can't bc the search function is like splitting atoms! Is there anyway to make it more usable? Or is there a fool-proof list of rules someone can post that work?

How does one search exact phrase on the new board? Quotes don't seem to work.

My computer hates boolean search functions, so in order to actually read the results that I find from doing a search, I have to right click and choose "properties" and then copy/paste that URL directly into my browser. Don't know if anyone else ever has that problem, but that's how I've learned to overcome it.

Thank you for all the great tips!

sounds like an old broswer or a bad search engine

google works with boolean searches (ie, 'x AND y'), if you're having problems with URLs it could be a broswer issue

use FireFox