Love Thread: Search Troubles

I've been trying to use the search fuction to find some threads from a ways back. However, whenever I type in what I want to search for, what forum it was in, and click "search," just about every thread comes up in the results. I've tried using two different browsers, so I'm clueless as to what the problem is.

Any help is appriciated.

--Ryan

------------------
"We went to a PARK in BOTSWANA." -Dubya

You'll have to be a little more specific about what you're searching for. With 350,000 posts chances are something like "Holiday World" or "Magnum" is going to come up thousands of times.

------------------
Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
DELETED! What time does the water show start?

I was searching for a thread with a title (something to the effect of), "Ever been stuck on a ride?" I entered the whole title, "stuck", and different combinations, and the results had 99% of the same threads that are on page one right now.

--Ryan

------------------
"I don't like anyone's balls to roll..." - Koaster King

I usually have the engine order the results by "rank" instead of "date." Have you tried that? It seems to work pretty decent for me. Perhaps a FAQs section for the Search Feature could be implemented? Just a suggestion, seeing as we're talking about searching and all. :)

------------------
Whenever you can ride a roller coaster and experience 15 spots of intense airtime, you know you're on a good coaster. (see: Phoenix)

Yes, searching by rank will likely score you better results.

------------------
Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
DELETED! What time does the water show start?

Does the search engine do an AND search (the right way to do it), or an OR search (useless)?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I've not implemented any other operators. What you see in action is the FullText indexing engine that comes with SQL Server. The rank search actually does a pretty good job, you just have to be specific as hell and specify a rank sort order. It's not perfect, but I'm working on some ideas for the next version.

------------------
Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
DELETED! What time does the water show start?

Voila! I searched by rank, and while the results still seemed random, I found what I was looking for. Thanks guys.

--Ryan

P.S. Does it search for words in the title or throughout the entire thread?

------------------
Pocket Pool - my anti-drug

I think it searches the entire thread, so if anyone ever does a search about Legend or Raven, they're screwed. Why you ask? Because L_n_R's name will come up all the time! ;) Perhaps I'm wrong, but that could be a potential reason for so many "random" results.

------------------
Whenever you can ride a roller coaster and experience 15 spots of intense airtime, you know you're on a good coaster. (see: Phoenix)

Yea I had that problem - I was recently trying to search for someone that might have posted the location of a "Giant" store near Hershey so I could grab a discount ticket this weekend, but when I entered "Giant discount hershey" into the search, I got threads that had the word giant in them and had nothing to do with Hershey, and had discount and had no "giant" or "Hershey" in them - I quickly gave up. If the search was easier to use, I think people would use it more. As it was, I was afraid to post my question because I figured it would get the "why didn't you search moron?" treatment.

------------------
Formerly PittDesigner (graduating soon!)
Lifelong fan of all Impulses!
--Brett

I've always been curious about this, as searching is what I do for a living:

If searching by 'rank' is the best way to find the answer, why isn't it the default search criteria?

Because it's more CPU intensive. I've actually got a better search algorithm now, but it'll have to wait until the next version of the forums.

------------------
Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
DELETED! What time does the water show start?

I just did a little tweak that made some performance gains in the search by rank. It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction until I get to a point where I can bust the new forums here.

------------------
Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
DELETED! What time does the water show start?