Help with searching

[BizUser]

Trying to be a good forum user, searching before posting, but I'm having difficulty searching (and I'm sure I'm going to be embarrassed to learn the answer...).

I tried: ntsc AND pal AND (conversion OR change)

I got lots of hits, many of which clearly did not include ntsc (for example).

So I broke down the search...

I used ntsc AND pal AND conversion , got 203 hits.

I then used ntsc AND pal AND change , got 211 hits

I then used ntsc AND pal AND (conversion OR change) , got 5090 hits

Clearly, the latter query should (logically) return somewhere below (203+211) hits. I'm guessing the search engine has no way to implement precedence, so it's simply looking for 'change', OR, ntsc+pal+conversion.

So is there a way to use 'OR' in conjunction with 'AND', in the manner I'm expecting?

Thanks!

[BizUser]

One other search issue. I got an error running a program (error 46 or similar). I tried to search for it, but got a message similar to 'search term "46" is less than minimum character size'. So I could not search for this error message. I also tried enclosing in quotes, ("error 46") but same issue. I eventually found info on the error by searching for the error message text, but it was more complicated.

I realize you are probably using a 3rd party forum tool and/or search engine, but if you can configure this, allowing quoted strings would be useful!

[IanB]

Dear all,

I know this has been well discussed previously but has never been really resolved satisfactorily.

Can the search engine be taught to accept quoted queries and important short elements like numbers and forum relevant abbrevs like "DV"?

Typical queries I would love to be able to do:-

"Windows media player 9"
"DV whatever you like"
"Error 42 something broke"
....

All these fall foul of the 3 char minimum

"ntsc AND pal AND (conversion OR change)"
"DIVX AND (bug OR problem or difficulty)"
....

And these give useless results due to lack of precidence operators "(,)"

Regards

IanB

[Doom9]

This board software is a complete package, with search engine and everything. So if you like something to be changed, especially when it concerns so crucial functions, you have to convince the developers @ vbulletin.com to implement it in a future version.

[IanB]

Doom9,

Thanks for the explanation.

Perhaps we could encourage we the members to gently seek such a valuable improvment.;)

IanB

[ccsint]

The search function really is flakey, however. A search for: IFOUPDATE and SECOND only returns results with IfoUpdate, not second.

I know we encourage searching, but if i can't find the correct results..... <shrug>. Maybe one day the developers will fix it, i guess.

[Swede]

This is due to the word second is a "badword" in vBulletin. There are a couple of hundred words that never gets into the searchtable (ex. again, anyway, hello, indeed and so on). Even without all these words the searchtables are currently at ~300MB...

How to know which words won't help you in your search? Well, you could try to search for *only* SECOND since you'll get zero results you know that it's not a good word to search for.