That **** search engine

[WebBoard]

From: Tibor Berenyi


Hi ppl,

I found this little treasure while searching the archives. Its for ppl who find the search engine on this site a wee bit frustrating - as I did.

"Hi Mike,

I fortuituously found a way of searching the archives, and for that matter any part of this forum. I was using a search engine (Google in this occurrence) and came across an reference to a post in this forum. So I tried Defence Housing and I also tried "off the plan", and it gave me the posts where the exact phrase appeared. With Google I input this: "off the plan" site:www.somersoft.com.au

Hope this helps

Cheers Jacques




Hi Jacques,

Take a bow! Finally, someone with some lateral thinking has found a way to overcome the limitations of the Archives search engine. It's called Google of all things. It can search phrases. Whoopee!!! Find it at: http://www.timeline.com.au/search/google.html

Domain Restrict Some words, when followed by a colon, have special meaning to Google. One such word for Google is the "site:" operator. To search a specific domain or site, use the "site:sampledomain.com" syntax in the Google search box. For example, to find off the plan information on Somersoft's site, enter: "off the plan" site:somersoft.com.au

Thanks, Jacques, you made my day. Mike"

Thanks Jacques ! Yay.

 

[Sim]

Reply: 1
From: Sim' Hampel


Unfortunately this does not work anymore. The old forum was hosted on the somersoft.com.au domain, the new one is outsourced to WebCentral.

Because of the nature of the forum application, it is not suitable for web crawlers like Google to search and index it.

So sorry, you are stuck with the search engine provided by the WebBoard application.

Here are some suggestions for things that might make your life a little easier:

1. Minimise the search space by only selecting one forum at a time. For example only select "Property Investor Forum" or "Property Investor Archive" on their own, to minimise how many possible matches will be returned and keep things manageable.

2. Maybe also restrict the date range. To only search documents posted this year, enter "1 Jan 2002" (without the quotes) into the "From:" box - you do not need to put anything in the "To:" box if you want to search everything up until today.

3. Sort order is your friend !. Default order is by Date. More useful might be to sort by Confidence (a score based on how many matches it found in the document or how close the matches were to your search string), by Topic (groups all messages with the same topic together), or by Author - if you know who wrote a post on a particular subject, you can skip ahead to read just those matches for that author (must use detailed results format for this to work).

4. Try Detailed results format. This puts in more information such as the author's name, and part of the first line of the post, so you can possibly see what they were talking about without actually opening it.

Hope this helps.

 

[WebBoard]

Reply: 1.1
From: Tibor Berenyi


Thanks Sim, finally getting some results now !

Cheers

Tibor