A question about the Forum Search facility

[pjetson]

A forum search often seems to find too many matches, particularly when searching on common words.

Is there an advanced search facility somewhere that I haven't been able to find, or is there a google-like set of extra search options built into the search facility?

 

[Beja]

I use Google search putting basic4ppc at the beginning of my query.. it returns very useful and more hits.
Ex: basic4ppc Game
However, b4a search utility has better structure and more accurate suggestions.

 

[Erel]

Is there an advanced search facility somewhere that I haven't been able to find

The search engine in this site is more advanced than most forums search engines (which doesn't mean that it is anywhere near Google).

You can limit your search to a specific "prefix" by clicking on the prefix list at the left side.

Can you provide some examples of terms which returned bad results?

 

[pjetson]

Can you provide some examples of terms which returned bad results?

I didn't mean bad results, I just meant too many results, often that aren't very relevant.

For example, if you were to search for "first post" to try to find only the questions that people are asking, you get seven pages of results, most of which do not seem to be first posts.

This seems to be because the search facility doesn't accept quoted strings - instead, it seems to search for first OR post. The search facility also doesn't seem to accept - and + operators, which would also be handy.

Now, the example that I used above isn't particularly interesting, and a much better result can be had in this case by searching for (first but I'm sure you get the general idea.

Using Google to do a site search by adding +site:basic4ppc.com to the start of a search string works well, but it's less convenient.

 

[Erel]

"first post" will never return relevant results as this term doesn't appear in first posts.

 

[pjetson]

I should have picked a better example.

 

[pjetson]

"(First post)" seems to be in the header of every first post in the search results. Anyway, it was a poor example, which is diverting from the real question.

 

[Erel]

"(first post)" is a link added by the search engine to allow you to navigate to the thread's first post. It is not part of the content.