Hello Brian.

I'm not sure if this has been covered before because if i use the SG101 search engine with the word "search" it gives back more useless pages than i can cope with. I find the search page hard to use generally.

Is there an alternative or is seaching so power hungry it needs to be restrictive?

The current search page seems to give a lot of people problems, I'm not totally sure why. It does seem to work reasonably well for me. By default it displays threads that have results in them, which can be confusing. I usually change that to show posts.

LHR's advice is spot on.

In any event, SG101 2.0 (which is in the works now) is probably not going to use the same forums software, so it will be something entirely different.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
Need help with the site? SG101 FAQ - Send me a private message - Email me

"It starts... when it begins" -- Ralf Kilauea

My problem when I use the search feature is when I want to go back to the list of the search results I get a Web Page Expired screen and have to start the search process all over again. What am I doing wrong?

BTW - I like LHR's sugesstion and will try that.

CUTBACK

Brian
I'm probably going to punt and just incorporate a google search as a first attempt in SG101 2.0.

I was faced with the same decision years back for my last employer, but ultimately decided not to reinvent the engine... the free one works fine.

Mike
http://www.youtube.com/morphballio

Yeah, IE doesn't seem to use the back button the way it was intended. Often it will actually try to load the page again instead of using the old version out of cache. Firefox does a better job in this respect.

But yeah, in any event, I think leveraging google for SG101 2.0 will give better searches with the least amount of effort on my part. We are just tying ourselves to the giant Google monster. But I already am in many other ways...and if it doesn't work out I can go another route.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
Need help with the site? SG101 FAQ - Send me a private message - Email me

"It starts... when it begins" -- Ralf Kilauea

Who said I liked the forums search feature? I didn't write the phpBB forums software that you are using now. Therefore my personal preference doesn't enter into it. Yes, I do like command line interfaces but I would never impose that on the users of this site. As I have said a few times, I am trying to get something better for SG101 2.0.

Having said all that, you actually can get reasonable results out of it if you use enough terms, narrow to specific forums or user, and display results as posts.

Indeed, searching specifically in thread titles is lacking right now.

For now, open all search results in a new tab or window, then you won't have to use the back button.

Searching is a huge problem to solve. It consumes lots of resources on the back end. It isn't an easy thing to implement.

I just discovered that the nifty free tools that Google gives you to search sites are limited. They only supply 64 results tops. You have to pay an annual fee to get more. So now I am thinking integrating google might not be the best idea.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
Need help with the site? SG101 FAQ - Send me a private message - Email me

"It starts... when it begins" -- Ralf Kilauea

Last edited: May 28, 2009 18:05:06

Staredge
The thing that irritates me is being told I can't make a search so soon after the last one. I read so fast that if there's only one post, I'm done and ready to go back. (This is on the New Posts page)

Again, this is an artifact of the crude search engine that the phpBB forums use. Searching is very expensive, and people could bring the site to its knees if they did nothing but execute searches willy nilly. They attempt to throttle it to make up for the crude techniques they currently use.

I'm looking into some better full-site searches now.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
Need help with the site? SG101 FAQ - Send me a private message - Email me

"It starts... when it begins" -- Ralf Kilauea

Although not the most feature rich search engine in the world, I don't have any trouble finding things I'm looking for as long as I display the posts instead of threads, select the proper forum, use quotes, search for specific authors, etc.

For example, my last search was to find all posts that were made by IvanP that had the term "echo" in the post. Returned two pages worth of results. Voila! More than adequate IMO.

Ryan
The Secret Samurai Website
The Secret Samurai on Facebook

Hah, I'm actually a *NIX CLI geek from way back... there's a GUI equivalent to everything these days, but old habits die hard.

I didn't know there were such limitations with Google now, good to know. It looks to still be the best external search service out there anyway, as other ones like Atomz have search or crawling caps that wouldn't work here either. I'll try to keep an eye out for any other free packages or scripts I find though. (My current employer is going to want this info, anyway.)

Mike
http://www.youtube.com/morphballio

morphball: yes they don't advertise the limit very well. However check the red letters here:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-AJAX-Search-API

When I played with the search API on google itself I would only get 8 pages of 8 results each.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
Need help with the site? SG101 FAQ - Send me a private message - Email me

"It starts... when it begins" -- Ralf Kilauea