Sim
Administrator
I've enabled a new type of search facility on the forums - something built in to the database server which is faster and more effective than the search we previously had available.
You can now use natural language search and boolean search terms (AND, OR, NOT) to help you refine your searches.
Natural language allows you to include all the joining words you'd normally use in a sentence, but which would cause the old search to complain and give no results. For example, you can now use search phrases such as "how to subdivide land", and it will just ignore common words rather than stop and complain like the old search would have.
Boolean search allows you to be more explicit about what results you want.
AND means both terms must be in the results, example search: "growth AND income" will match only threads (or posts) which contain both terms
OR means one or the other, so "growth OR income" will match any thread which mentions growth or any thread which mentions income (or both)
NOT of course, excludes terms, so "growth NOT income" will only match threads or posts which contain the term growth, but which also do not contain the term income.
You can already do similar searches using Google, but the Google search doesn't easily allow you to filter search results by threads or posts or by user or by forum and so on, nor does it display results in a forum-friendly way with details of who posted it and so on ... so it can be worth using the built-in search instead of the Google search sometimes.
I hope you find this new search useful.
PS. when I finally get to do the big migration to Somersoft v4 later this year, I will be implementing an even better search engine which from what I've heard from other people, works really well and will be a huge improvement on what we have now.
You can now use natural language search and boolean search terms (AND, OR, NOT) to help you refine your searches.
Natural language allows you to include all the joining words you'd normally use in a sentence, but which would cause the old search to complain and give no results. For example, you can now use search phrases such as "how to subdivide land", and it will just ignore common words rather than stop and complain like the old search would have.
Boolean search allows you to be more explicit about what results you want.
AND means both terms must be in the results, example search: "growth AND income" will match only threads (or posts) which contain both terms
OR means one or the other, so "growth OR income" will match any thread which mentions growth or any thread which mentions income (or both)
NOT of course, excludes terms, so "growth NOT income" will only match threads or posts which contain the term growth, but which also do not contain the term income.
You can already do similar searches using Google, but the Google search doesn't easily allow you to filter search results by threads or posts or by user or by forum and so on, nor does it display results in a forum-friendly way with details of who posted it and so on ... so it can be worth using the built-in search instead of the Google search sometimes.
I hope you find this new search useful.
PS. when I finally get to do the big migration to Somersoft v4 later this year, I will be implementing an even better search engine which from what I've heard from other people, works really well and will be a huge improvement on what we have now.
