Search Feature?

I have many a time posted a topic, and been told to "use the search feature". The predicament is that whenever I search something I seem to get and absurd amount of results. I am expected to sift through hundreds of pages of search results?

What I really want to know though is how to effectively use the search. Is their anyway to narrow results, or make the search find every word in the search field?

For example: while trying to find information on the "plastic roller coaster", I entered the search "plastic coaster". This search produced over 500 pages of results; clearly the search feature looked for the word "coaster". After altering the search to just "plastic" you still come up with over 100 results. What I really want to know, is if there is a way to make the search look for both, for example, "coaster" and "plastic", effectively narrowing down the results?

Jake Neufeld

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One thing you could do is type in your user name. it will come up with all the topics you have started or responded to.

I noticed this too. For example:

If you want to search for "Vekoma Flying Coaster", you would get every thread containing the word "coaster" "flying" or "vekoma", not the threads with all the words in one thread which gives you pages of threads.

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If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot 'em?

This has been brought up before, use the search feature.

Just kidding.

Thats the way it is, it appears tht putting your text in quots doesnt make a difference.

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So you believe that you are studying us, then kindly explain why you are the ones trapped in your seats.

try clicking on More Search Options before doing a search, and select the category appropriate for what your searching for. also try changing the order by option to Title. that seems to help for me, and usually cuts down on the number of results found.

otherwise there really doesnt seem to be much that we can do. these forums are so large that almost any word you search for is somewhere within each topic.

maybe in future versions of pop forums there will be an exact phrase search, but until then give the More Search Options a shot.

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John
Albany Entertainment:
http://albany.n3.net

First of all, you need to understand that things like "roller coaster" or "Vekoma" are so common that threads with the sheer number of instances of those terms will rank first.

Second, make sure that you're searching by rank. Someone recently said they couldn't find a thread about something related to "Entertainment Weekly," and sure enough, when sorted by rank, there it was, first on the list.

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Jeff - Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com - Sillynonsense.com
DELETED!

Thanks for your help everyone. I have been using the "rank" option, and I have been able to narrow searches relatively well.

I know very well that there are thousands of posts, and that does limit the effctiveness of any search. I just want to clarify though:is there anyway to do a narrowed search, kinda of like a venn diagram? While there are thousands of posts with "coaster" in them, there may very well only be fifty or so with the words "coaster", "chile", and "boomerang" in them.