I know this has been gone over several time but this 4 character word limit is really getting under my skin. Is there any way to turn on a "phrase" feature for lack of a better word? This way, a movie title in could be bracketed in quotes and searched as a single phrase rather than two seperate words. This would make what is a great resouce even better.

To make my point, try searching on the following titles which I just grabbed out of my collection:

Top Gun
Tao of Steve
Ice Age
Big Easy
American Pie
Midnight Run
RKO 281
Spy Game
The War Of The Roses

You cannot get any meaningful results using the lagerer words (if there are any).

My current frustration stems from trying to get an episode list for the upcomming Family Guy box set so I can delete my saved eps from my Tivo. I tried "Family Guy" and the engine just told me where to go. If VBulliten can't do this I have to say the limit should be revisited by the owners of the site.

In closing, I know I pay nothing for the use of this site. But, I do try to click through when I am buying online (what else can I do?). Also, I'm not a total newbie...my account must have aged out because the system did not recognize any of my email addresses.

Just trying to make a good thing better-

Tom

BTW I have read http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...hreadid=254838

It's not like the 4-character searches work properly either, but this has been discussed ad nauseum ... just one of the quirks of vBulletin. Hell, I've actually tried searching for a DVD Talk thread through google and gotten more accurate results.

Anyway, I agree ... my biggest complaint and confusion would be why we don't have phrase searching. Sure, I can understand why we can't search for <B>war</B> or <B>the</B>, but you'd think <B>"The War of the Roses"</B> would be fine if qualified by quotes as a complete phrase. It could just be that vBulletin's search sucks in this capacity as well, but that's pretty weak.

das

vBulletin's search does suck. Version 3.0 greatly improves on much of this, though given the way it indexes messages, I don't think phrases are in the cards either.

Here are the changes listed on vBulletin's site as far as searching is concerned in the next version:
[*] Get daily for just one category[*] Search only in subscribed forums[*] A list of ignored words or words used in a search are added to the results page[*] Option to find only started by 'username'[*] Display matching forums in results[*] Support for searching custom profile fields[*] Search for exact username (e.g. turn off wildcards)[*] Autoselect forumid for search when clicking search button on toplinks from the forum.[*] Quoted text excluded from search.[*] Associate searchid with userid so people can't insert searchid's and get results they're not supposed to see[*] Search system is improved with regards to speed. Even faster now!

Edit -- the word from up on high:

It doesn’t seem to make any difference that my car has a lighted ashtray if I can’t drive faster than 30 MPH.

That’s JMO, and I’m stuck with it.

What a bummer. Hopefully it will be fixed with VB3. I rarely complain, bu I've had soooo much frustration with trying to do searches. It's especcially bad when you're in the exchange forum and the tilte you're hoping to trade for won't come up.

It seems to me that talking about fixes to be implemented in the next version (whatever/whenever that will be) is akin to saying “All of our problems with XP should be solved with the next service pack.”

What I don’t understand is why some people seem to take criticism of the search function so personally [e.g. ragging on one’s kid]. I almost get the impression that there’re folks here who are directly involved with VB development. I mean, it’s not like we’re saying DVDTalk sux…

Well, they're not going to be fixed in the current version.

I'm not saying that the next version of vBulletin will solve all of our problems. I'm just rattling off what the developers are addressing in 3.0, which is currently being tested in a handful of websites. (I'm working with one of them...)

There are, or at least were, folks here who are directly involved with vB development. I'm not among them, and I'm not really seeing any posts in this thread that would prompt the sort of reply you just provided. Maybe something was deleted in the interim...?

I guess my question is: are you complaining just to complain? The problem's out of Geoff's hands, at least for the moment. I'm not sure what you want him or anyone else to do, and I don't see what harping about a known issue is meant to accomplish.

Fair question. And I can understand how you would come to that conclusion.

No, I’m not complaining just to complain. That’s what we have Enterprise threads for.

But, since my comments are obviously not welcome, I’ll keep them to myself. I guess a two-month gap between posts on this subject constitutes harping, n’est ce pas?

It's not that they aren't welcome, but once an issue is known, it's been discussed, and nothing can be done in the meantime...well, I mean, what does further complaining accomplish? I'm as disappointed as anyone about the state of the Search tool, but unfortunately, there's not really anything that can be done as things stand now. Sorry if I'm coming off as particularly grating about this, but...I'm a grating person, so being grating is kind of second nature.

Dude, if pointless complaining were outlawed, it’d save a HELLuva lot of bandwidth.

Perhaps it would be better not to even hint about the slightest chance of the merest possibility of a new version until it actually looms on the horizon? That would be my answer to the “what are we supposed to do?” mantra.

And I’ll just ignore search-problem threads until I see the numbers at the bottom of the page change.



And I would recommend that you avoid Enterprise threads.

Now search for me doesn't even work.

.... because it is only two letter long?