Forum Search Engine

**Mark_R** · 28th November 2009 08:19 PM

Hi,
Am I the only one who finds the search engine on this forum to be rather poor? Is there some sort of Boolean functionality that I am missing?

For example; I tried a search on "State Machine", the first hit is for a recent thread about occupations that happened to have the word "state" and "machine" in different posts 2 pages apart. The first hit that has anything to do with state machines is 8 down on the list. This is typical of my experience for all the searches I run on this forum.

I tried "State+Machine", "State and Machine" etc. to no avail. I could find nothing in the advanced search such as "search for all of the following words__________" or similar.

I find that people on forums are quick to jump on someone for not searching before asking, but that may be easier said than done.

**Sceadwian** · 28th November 2009 08:42 PM

The only thing I use the search engine here for is finding posts that I've commented in since the last time I was on.

Do not use the search engine here for anything else as you've found out it's mostly useless. Go to Google, go to advanced search and limit the search to this domain name, works like a charm, due to the traffic Google keeps all the posts from here cached. Most people don't realize you can use Google like that. I suggested electromaster somehow integrate a dialog to do this on the search page instead of the standard PHP search but didn't really go anywhere.

**Mark_R** · 28th November 2009 10:05 PM

Thanks Sceadwian, that worked great. It even listed my original post of this thread which is only an hour old. Apparently big brother really is watching.

Funny, I knew that you could google by domain, but I hadn't tried it because I figured the cache of the forum would be marginal. Obviously my understanding of search engines is out of date.

**Sceadwian** · 28th November 2009 10:20 PM

If you noticed the ads supplied on this site are from Google, they scratch your back if you scratch theirs =) I think you can request updates of your websites on demand if you want as well.
As far as big brother goes I trust Google more than I do most other companies and a whole lot more than my own government =) I mean make no mistake about it, they're in this to make money, but they're also in it to honestly advance the functionality of a lot of things.