I tried to use search for a phrase "channel listing by number" and instead it found all the instances of the words "channel, listing, and number".

That's a lot of reading about stuff I am not interested in at the moment, and an inefficient use of forum resources!

Can the search function be upgraded? I believe it would tremendously help both users and experts (no need to ask and answer same question over and over).

R.

I didnt write the forum software and have no control over how its searches.

Sub,

I went to the vbulletin site which is powered by their own software - albeit a slightly newer version (Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.7.0 Beta 3 vs 3.6.8 here)


When searching their forum (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/search.ph...id=3918274) with double quotes (IE "the blog") it does search correctly for the whole phrase while on this forum it splits it into two words. Perhaps there is a setting that needs to be changed or an install of the latest version will correct the issue.

CV

It may be something theyve improved in their new 3.7 version of the forum software. Its a beta version though and not available to the public.

Is full text search on - perhaps the two types of searches use different methods:

Quote:Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Search Type

By default, vBulletin will use its internal indexing feature. The results of this indexing process is stored in two tables, word and postindex. This provides a fast search mechanism but can cause problems on larger forums due to the ever increasing size of these tables. Each unique word is indexed in the word table and each occurrence of the word is indexed in the postindex table. To get around the large amount of space these tables can occupy we implemented MySQL Fulltext Search. The search type screen allows you to switch between the two of these. It is a simple toggle so submitting the screen switches between the two modes.

When switching a forum to the fulltext search mode, you will want to consider emptying the indices that the default search engine built. These indices are not used by the fulltext search and consume a large portion of your database. You should be certain that you are going to permanently use the fulltext search before removing these indices since, generally, it takes a lot of time and server load to rebuild these indices. Another consideration is during any time that the fulltext option is enabled, these indices will not be updated by any new posts. Using fulltext search for an extended period of time will leave these indices stale and you may still wish to rebuild them.
Note:
The minimum and maximum length of words to be indexed is defined by the ft_min_word_len and ft_max_word_len system variables (available as of MySQL 4.0.0). The default minimum value is four characters. The default maximum depends on your version of MySQL. If you change either value, you must rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes. For example, if you want three-character words to be searchable, you can set the ft_min_word_len variable by putting the following lines in an option file:

[mysqld]
ft_min_word_len=3

Then restart the server and rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes. Also note particularly the remarks regarding myisamchk in the instructions following this list.

For more on Fulltext Search from MySQL please visit:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/f...uning.html
You can also empty these indices in the Update Counters section of Maintenance.

Try again. I've enabled that setting.

Dang it didn't work - although it no longer listed the search as "the, blog" but "the blog" - If I have more time I'll take a further gander at their docs and forum.

CV

I'd agree that phrase searches would be a useful feature.

Quote:Try again. I've enabled that setting.

search for "newer version" with the quotes, still brings up all the posts with newer and version. Google doesn't seems to have been through either as it returned

Quote:Your search - "newer version" site:forums.gbpvr.com - did not match any documents.

Martin

Ok from: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=198462

Quote: Originally Posted by Wayne Luke
According to MySQL. Don't think there is a syntax for natural language search and not sure what the vBulletin search does since I can't understand the regular expressions.

The boolean full-text search capability supports the following operators:

* +
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned.
* -
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned.
* (no operator)
By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the rows that contain it are rated higher. This mimics the behavior of MATCH() ... AGAINST() without the IN BOOLEAN MODE modifier.
* > <
These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a row. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.
* ( )
Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.
* ~
A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the row's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking “noise” words. A row containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.
* *
The asterisk serves as the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected.
* "
A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (‘"’) characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. The full-text engine splits the phrase into words, performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. The engine then performs a substring search for the phrase in the records that are found, so the match must include non-word characters in the phrase. For example, "test phrase" does not match "test, phrase".
If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. For example, if all words are either stopwords or shorter than the minimum length of indexed words, the result is empty.

The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean full-text operators:

* 'apple banana'
Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.
* '+apple +juice'
Find rows that contain both words.
* '+apple macintosh'
Find rows that contain the word “apple”, but rank rows higher if they also contain “macintosh”.
* '+apple -macintosh'
Find rows that contain the word “apple” but not “macintosh”.
* '+apple +(>turnover <strudel)'
Find rows that contain the words “apple” and “turnover”, or “apple” and “strudel” (in any order), but rank “apple turnover” higher than “apple strudel”.
* 'apple*'
Find rows that contain words such as “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, or “applet”.
* '"some words"'
Find rows that contain the exact phrase “some words” (for example, rows that contain “some words of wisdom” but not “some noise words”). Note that the ‘"’ characters that surround the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that surround the search string itself.

Some words are ignored in full-text searches:

* Any word that is too short is ignored. The default minimum length of words that are found by full-text searches is four characters.
* Words in the stopword list are ignored. A stopword is a word such as “the” or “some” that is so common that it is considered to have zero semantic value. There is a built-in stopword list, but it can be overwritten by a user-defined list.

Not sure how to set boolean full text though

I tried to use google advanced search for the word "recording". The answer:
Your search - recording site:forums.gbpvr.com - did not match any documents.

I hoped I could use google but it looks like gbpvr is invisible to them.
Damn.