For the love of God, can someone (Geoff) please upgrade the search capability for DVDTalk. It irritates me to no end that the same damn questions are posted multiple times. I normally get angry about duplicate posts, however, after trying to use the "search" (and I use that term lightly) function on this site, I see why there are so many duplicates.

There are much better turnkey search solutions out there or hell, maybe even some scripts.

I am sure this has been discussed before but I was unable to find anything using the "search" function!

The other day I searched for the thread called Why is the term "colored person" bad, but "person of color" good? I remembered that the title involved the words "colored" and "color," so I searched for each of these - restricting my efforts to the Other Forum, and Titles Only.

I got no matches.

I know *nothing* about how computers / the 'Net work, but why did this happen? Is it because in the actual thread title, color and colored were inside quotes?

Well, if it were that easy, it would've been done. Hopefully some of the issues with searching in vBulletin will be addressed with the impending release of vBulletin 3.0. Until then, there's not really a whole lot Geoff can do about it. There could be a problem with the search index, but I'd imagine Geoff has cleared it out and rebuilt it several times, and any benefit that course of action provides is temporary.

Some of the "search sucks" threads of days past:

http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=277446
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=273482
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=268072
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=266209
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=263010
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=259383
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=254838
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=251291
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=244390
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=217401
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=138479
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=126011
http://dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread....hreadid=123418

ctyner,

I understand that Geoff is doing what he can (that's what I hope anyway). I am unfamiliar with BB admin so I am unaware of the issues faced. Does vBulletin allow for search add-ins? I would think vBulletin would not be so naive to think their search functionality was the be-all, end-all of BB search functionality (actually after cruising the forums at vBulletin, they [developers] don't think that good search fuctionality is critical! I have yet to hear anything more shortsighted and just wrong than that statement. Geoff, you might want to reevaluate your BB choice. )

I cruised the vBulletin board and found a wonderful tidbit regarding searching in vBulletin...
Thanks to Wayne Luke for the above information. I guess I will have to put up with and post my own duplicates until then.

In that people can edit the scripts and rewrite the search functionality themselves, sure. I'm not aware of one, and I'd imagine if a better solution were available, vBulletin users would use that instead of (justifiably) complaining about the poor search implementation currently available.

I've been to at least one vbulletin site that allows searching for two or three letter words, unlike here. http://www.soundcircuit.com

vBulletin doesn't require that searches include 4 characters or more. It's a setting used here and on pretty much every board with a decent amount of posts. Small sites can accomodate the extra size. Large sites can't.

It would be nice, though, if it could recognize "" as "get exactly what's inside the quotes." That way, you could use quotes to search for something like "way of the gun" with the engine searching for the full string (including spaces).

Does the review search engine also use vBulletin? It would be *so* helpful if it would recognize keywords without having to match exact phrases. Right now, if you type in the major words from a title but not the connecting words, you won't get any result. Ie. searching for "fellowship ring" or "attack clones" gets no results... even though most other common search engines (like Google or Amazon's engine) work fine that way - in fact, Google specifically doesn't even include the minor words in the search. Heck, if you could just get it to disregard punctuation it would help.

And what would you suggest as the replacement? A lot of time and effort has gone into customizing this site, and tying everything into vBulletin. From what I've seen, you won't get the performance out of another board with the posts/users vB handles.

The vBulletin developers have expressed interest in this when they feel the new version of MySQL is ready to roll out.

No. I wrote everything related to the review software myself from the ground-up.

I copied over some code from the video game search <small>(which I wrote more recently, so it's more reflective of my current skills)</small> which should accomodate your requests a little better.

It still doesn't handle spelling errors.

Sorry, but I'm not Google, and I don't write search engines for a living.

I'm sure I could cobble together something much more powerful than exists now, but the functionality's been fine for me. :shrugs:

AndyCapps,

As I acknowledged before, I am not BB guru. I made the statement simply as a suggestion to reevaluate the current system. I am not a subscriber to the, "if ain't broke don't fix it," camp. Although, I feel that maxim doesn't apply in this situation due to the number of "brokes" with the search functionality.

I like phpbb. It appears to be stable despite the large number of threads, members, and posts. I welcome thoughts on this bbs and its search functionality.

I am sure that Geoff and company have, and will continue, to update, streamline, and improve this site (I hope they do). I'm not trying to diminish the work they do, I am trying to determine the root of the problem and IMO it is vB and not lack of effort.

Originally posted by ctyner
I wasn't trying to be overly critical, really. I was just using a commonly used search engine as an example - if someone is used to using Google, it's logical to think they'd try searching in the same way here.


Hurray! It works great - I think it will be a *lot* easier to find reviews now. Thanks for the fix!

soundcircuit is much much larger than dvdtalk. Furthermore, I recall some of the vbulletin developers saying that the search function doesn't have the server load problems it had in previous versions. Same goes for the PM function.

I think dvdtalk should at least allow three letter searches. It's quite frustrating.

Larger in what way?

soundcircuit
Total Posts: 1,141,206
Total Threads: 49929

dvdtalk
Total Posts: 1,319,497
Total Threads: 106,791

I don't see a way to tell how many members there are at soundcircuit. Or how many are logged in at any given time. Or what the most users online record is, and how recently it was set(to get a feel for how often it is exceeded). That would all factor in to the board's performance.

A lot of boards I visit have a 4 character minimum. I've seen one recently that disabled search alltogether as a way to increase performance. That's one way to take care of the "problem". Other sites disable searches when the load is high, which is pretty frustrating. I agree that it sucks to not be able to search for three letter words, but I'm sure Geoff had good reasons for limiting it.

<small></small>I wonder what version of vB the guys you mention were talking about and on what platform. And who knows the best what the platform/configuration <i>here</i> can support?

I'd be more frustrated if performance was further downgraded. Searching is great but really it is the icing on the cake IMO: I would suggest that one comes here primarily here to read and post what is currently being posted. In-depth research is useful but to some extent that is what google and the rest of the web are for.

I've occasionally read people who say that they can't find a particular non-sticky thread they use a lot and wondered why they didn't bookmark it. Occasionally consolidation etc will mean that the URL changes but, nonetheless, bookmarking seems like a prudent move to me in particular cases.

I figured I'd bump this because it does a good job of explaining the search limitations and reasoning.

On a personal note, I think vBulletin is pretty solid (overall) and very popular, but the search feature is its peg leg....not that peg legs are bad, but still a factor....kind of like running a marathon, because it is pretty vital, but it still can be done on a peg leg...eventually you learn to work with the peg leg, and eventually...you don't even notice...unless you try to buy new shoes.

-pedagogue

too bad you can't search 2 or 3 words in just the TITLE of the thread. That would solve 80% of the search problems on both sides...

of course, you cant tell anything about a forum by the number of posts or the number of threads.. except how often that forum archives

member total would be a better term

of if you can break down to number of posts or number of threads per day

but there are few forums Ive been to, that are as active as this one.. anandtech is one of the few that comes to mind

We haven't forgotten about the search issues. It's the weakest part of the forum software and we have investigated other search hacks/options. Just want to get through the busy season before hacking things as massive as the search index.

Just in case this helps anyone - I found a little work around on another site. If you want to search for a three letter word, add a * to the end and it should work.

Go ahead - try searching for "vhs*" or something like that - it works with three letter words.

If you search Feedback for vhs*, it will bring up this thread and one other:

The only other one mentioning VHS:

http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...ghlight=vhs%2A

I don't know about soundscape, but you can easily drive up registration numbers by forcing everyone to register before being able to do anything on the board. I've had to close my board to non-registered visitors because of server load issues and have had massive spikes in registrations. Just my $0.03.