Search help -

[daveyboy70]

I have been guilty of posting things that have no doubtly been discussed in previous forums. I am trying to hone my search skills but find it frustrating and am looking for some tips.....

The last straw was trying to search out some of the ingenious bed configurations that people have put in their Delicas and coming up with some 372 posts with very few of them to do with the subject I was looking for....How are others finding the information they need from the forums without spending multiple hours at the screen....

Thanks for the help
Dave

[mararmeisto]

Painfully and with patience. Apparently the search engine on this board is not very good (I don't use it much, so I couldn't really say), but I've heard that a good trick is to Google what you want with "delica.ca" in the search bar. I just tried Googling {"delica.ca" bed} and got about 136 results.

The search engine on this site includes the header each time in its search results. So, if a thread with the word bed in the title has 67 posts, there will be at least 67 returns from the search engine. Google recognizes that they are all in the same thread and calls it a single search return (it appears to anyway).

[fexlboi]

The search function of phpbb is not very good indeed.

If you want to find information just on delica.ca use Google with this search term: "site:delica.ca bed" (no quotation marks)

[mararmeisto]

The search function of phpbb is not very good indeed.

If you want to find information just on delica.ca use Google with this search term: "site:delica.ca bed" (no quotation marks)

See, I knew there was a way to get Google to search only a single site. Thanx fexlboi!

[dfnder]

Could someone in charge create a google search link on our site?

[daveyboy70]

thanks for the tip! it is greatly appreciated, my wife says thanks to as I used to sit in front of the computer cursing at having to scroll through tonnes of unrelated information looking for something relevant, as usual the delica.ca members come through.

Cheers
Dave

[TardisDeli]

The Deli Search Engine has a SECOND search panel, AFTER you have your initial results. First key in your word (ie Horn = 134 matches). Then you see your list of matches, now look at the top right of the list, see a NEW BOX "Search these" and key in a narrow word (ie girly horn) and bingo only 1 match currently.

The problem with bed search is so often the posts are not on a single topic, ie only on a bed, but often come inside a posting about camping (we post a photo of a camp trip we did, and rather than admiring the beautiful view in our photo...or the scary road the deli just navigated ... other deli folk will say hey look at the bed, can you tell us how you built it).

Cheers, Christine.

[loki]

The Deli Search Engine has a SECOND search panel, AFTER you have your initial results. First key in your word (ie Horn = 134 matches). Then you see your list of matches, now look at the top right of the list, see a NEW BOX "Search these" and key in a narrow word (ie girly horn) and bingo only 1 match currently.

The problem with bed search is so often the posts are not on a single topic, ie only on a bed, but often come inside a posting about camping (we post a photo of a camp trip we did, and rather than admiring the beautiful view in our photo...or the scary road the deli just navigated ... other deli folk will say hey look at the bed, can you tell us how you built it).

Cheers, Christine.

bingo, narrowing your results is the key :)

[Erebus]

The other problem with the forum's search engine is that it requires the search term to be 4 characters or more. So a search for "bed" results in zero hits. And even if it worked, it wouldn't get a post that only refers to a sleeping platform.

This kind of thing is why I'll often put a list of keywords at then of one of my posts; to increase the chance that your search term will match.

<rant on> The problem with search engines is that they only search for words. Library catalogues and such use what's called a controlled vocabulary to assign a term to the item, regardless of the words the author used. Then searching is easy, because everything on a topic will have that heading assigned. With search engines, you have to guess at all the synonyms, misspellings, variant spelling (color vs. colour), etc. <rant off>

[loki]

<rant on> The problem with search engines is that they only search for words. Library catalogues and such use what's called a controlled vocabulary to assign a term to the item, regardless of the words the author used. Then searching is easy, because everything on a topic will have that heading assigned. With search engines, you have to guess at all the synonyms, misspellings, variant spelling (color vs. colour), etc. <rant off>

not all search engines are that simple. google is much more sophisticated than that, and it will help will spelling and the like, and it's search algorithms are insanely good, the MJ new proved that they are still the best, within minutes of the news showing up on TMZ it was the number one hit on google searches for Michael Jackson and such, BING on the other hand which is brand new and should be better, didn't even have it on the first page.