Is it me, or is the search facility on this forum really rubbish..?

Can't seem to figure it out. When you put more than one word in, it seems to do an "or" instead of "and" so you get loads of stuff you not really looking for. It just stopped me looking up "HD", which I though would be pretty unique, plus I've had it deny knowledge of words I can see in front of me before now.

Sorry to moan. Its probably me - can anybody help me out with wot I'm doing wrong..? It would sure save me ages if I could figure out how to search properly... Google doesn't seem to go here either...

Dont blame me, I didnt write the forum software. This vBulletin software is used by a large percentage of forums on the net, and they all have the same search capabilities.

I think "HD" falls under the three letter minimum for a search word.

From memory you can put a + or - symbol before words help the search (ie, word must/mustnt be present).

Hi Barkers.

If you search, the forum tells you why there's no matches:

----
Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms.

The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search : HD
----

Very common for search engines to screen like that.

/Niels

Oh - sub as always quick(er) on the trigger

Sorry - didn't mean to moan. Not anybody's fault. I double checked the HD thing and you are right. Still annoying though.

Think I might download the whole forum and use Google desktop...

Afaik you can google the forum, I think there is a parameter to have google search a specifique website.

just be more specific in what you want
try adding and removing spaces and think what people would actually be asking or answering as far as what you want
so instead of just putting in hd
say you wanted hd playback
you could try that or how the hd is broadcast like what country etc think outside the square or what hardware you have is another one like hvr3000 then hd and dont use short words thats why hd will be giving bad results
words like setup hvr3000
or jumpy playback hvr3000
hd just wont do it no matter how good the search engine is

True to my word, I just found a gizmo called HTTrack which is filling up my hard-drive with the whole forum as we speak. That's probably quite sad if you stop to think about it...

Anyway, first time I tried, it complained that the rules in the "Robots.txt" file was blocking it from grabbing the files.

Do you think this might be the reason google is blind to the forum..? Something in "Robots.txt" is telling it not to go here..?

(34MBytes so far...)

barkers123 Wrote:(34MBytes so far...)

That's exactly why sub disabled bot access to the forums in robots.txt; too much bandwidth is used.

Cloning a complete website will get you chucked off many sites.

Now if sub was paying for bandwidth, we'd have to send the heavy gang round.

Sub... you didn't really do that, did you..?

It would be sooo fab to be able to google the forum. Without downloading it... (Just given up at 65MBytes, it was a silly idea anyway).

Does it really stuff up the bandwidth to allow a web-crawler in..? I think you can just allow Google in, can't imagine it visits more than once every 2 or 3 days anyway...