Searching (having a senior moment ... or maybe not)

[Bill Boehme]

Somebody toss me a bone. I needed to perform a search, but in order to minimize the number of matches and not have mostly irrelevant matches, I would like to match a short phrase exactly. I can't seem to find the right delimiters to tell the search function to search for the full phrase rather than individual words. I figured that there must be a help feature somewhere for using the search function, but struck out again. I can't even do a search to find "help on search". I am really hoping that this is just a senior moment and the search function is not as lame as it appeared to be. Please tell me that we have a robust search function with a great help tutorial.

 

[Tony Latham]

Bill:

Try adding a + in front of those words you are looking for and a - (minus) in front of those words you want to wean out..... For instance:

+Jet -walnut +spindle

Or something along that line should get you ever thread with Jet and spindle but nothing with walnut in it...... (I THINK!!!)

TL

 

[Joe Greiner]

Searching where? Different search engines have different rules. VBulletin (like here) stumbles on very short words. Google is more robust, and allows double quotes to 'marry' the keywords into a phrase. Google Advanced Search can EXclude any offenders. Try Google [aawforum "short phrase"], or something like that. Refine hits as needed for exclusion.

 

[LHauch]

Hi Bill,

Go to the Advanced search, then type the phrase between double quotes, such as: "convert dvr" The search does not appear to be case sensitive.

Cheers,

 

[Bill Boehme]

Bill:

Try adding a + in front of those words you are looking for and a - (minus) in front of those words you want to wean out..... For instance:

+Jet -walnut +spindle

Or something along that line should get you ever thread with Jet and spindle but nothing with walnut in it...... (I THINK!!!)

TL

Thanks, I will give that a try.

EDIT: It does not work

Searching where? Different search engines have different rules. VBulletin (like here) stumbles on very short words. Google is more robust, and allows double quotes to 'marry' the keywords into a phrase. Google Advanced Search can EXclude any offenders. Try Google [aawforum "short phrase"], or something like that. Refine hits as needed for exclusion.

Sorry, Joe, I guess that I did not make it clear enough that I was referring to the search feature on this forum.

Hi Bill,

Go to the Advanced search, then type the phrase between double quotes, such as: "convert dvr" The search does not appear to be case sensitive.

Cheers,

Thanks, I always use the advanced search, but have already ruled out the double quotes along with a lot of other delimiters.

Something that seems missing on the help pages for this forum is information on using the search engine. Maybe, it is a really simple search that does not have the capability to do exact phrases. I hope that I am wrong.

 

[LHauch]

Bill,
What is the exact phrase you are looking for?

If you have a single quote in it, try putting a backslash before the the quote, same thing for other characters like the question mark or exclamation ! character.

Cheers,

 

[Bill Boehme]

Bill,
What is the exact phrase you are looking for?

If you have a single quote in it, try putting a backslash before the the quote, same thing for other characters like the question mark or exclamation ! character.

Cheers,

yep, tried all of those things. Just type any three word phrase and you will see that it does a separate search for each. Even worse is that common words like "and", "of", "or" get discarded by the search feature. Here is an example to illustrate that point: "World of Wood". The search engine will do a separate search on "world" and "wood" and will discard the word "of".

 

[Clint5699]

Searching

Hey Bill ;

I am so glad you ask this question, I just filled out the survey and one of my dislikes is the search function here! I am not computer literate so this is a difficult site for me to understand. When i tried to search the archives for peppermills or candleholders both brought up "no matches". I have got to believe there are a gazilloin articles on these two basic items ???? The same is true in the picture gallery only I did get a few matches ( 6-8), seems like a situation that needs attention of whoever handles the website is in order.

Hopefully, our concerns will be positively addressed.

Clint Merrill

 

[Joe Greiner]

Google [aawforum "world of wood"] reported 2 hits yesterday, and 3 today (who knows why?).

The first hit of both searches is/was this thread, hitting Bill's post #7; the second today hit Bill's post #1 (again who knows why?).

The final hit was to a thread started 03-10-2006, t=1761.

Google also suggested breaking aawforum into aaw forum (2 words), which produced about 15,000 hits containing "world of wood."


I don't think you have to be computer literate to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. There are about 6 billion humans alive today, and about 50 billion websites. A billion is a big number. IIRC, a billion minutes ago precedes the birth of Christ. Google is purely a search engine. The search facility built in to VBulletin is peripheral; future updates may make it more robust, and there's a forum for VBulletin itself, where some of your concerns might be discussed. Website administrators don't have much control over it, except to choose options available in the software, which is basically a database - a really big database.

Last night on NOVA, was a program about DNA sequencing. One of the speakers described her software to compare DNA sequences, using a large gang of hard drives. Computation took a few hours; on a PC, it would have taken 35 years - assuming no power failures, of course.🙄

 

[Bill Boehme]

Thanks, Joe. Yes, a billion is a large number. Just like the national budget -- a billion here and a billion there ... and pretty soon it all adds up to big numbers. 😀

I have been to the VB forum (its actually a forum about forums so I suppose that it should be called a metaforum). It has probably been over a year since I last visited however.

Searching the Internet is entirely a different matter than searching this web site, which for all practical purposes, can be considered static. Implementing a filter function into a search is not a daunting issue -- although orderly sorting can get to be complex. I consider myself to be rather computer literate since I have been messing with computers for over forty years beginning with a Univac 1108 using FORTRAN. Things have evolved immeasurably since then. Things like personal computers or the Internet were not even imagined. Since then, I have written software in just about every well known computer language and also a few not so well known languages.

I hate that I missed the NOVA program on PBS last night. It is one of my favorite programs.

 

[Joe Greiner]

Clint:

I couldn't duplicate your experience, unless I did something different. I just got 23 hits for peppermills (including this thread - of course), and 22 hits for peppermill. Similarly, 2 for candleholders, and 1 for candleholder. Separating the components got 29 and 26 for pepper mill(s), and 13 and 7 for candle holder(s).

Bill:

I think the quote came from Everett Dirksen, senator from Ohio.😀

One of my professors back in the early 1970s predicted that computers would become a lot smaller than the IBM 360 we were using. I couldn't help wondering how they would accurately punch tiny holes in tiny cards; it didn't work out that way, of course. FWIW, I wrote an early Big Banner program, in FORTRAN (of all things), printed on the line printer, and the loud noise from the printer alerted everyone to its production; banners up to 20 feet long, or thereabouts - even did "white" letters on a black "background," but only one typeface. Centered on the multi-page printout, too.

Back to your original query, until VBulletin programmers catch up with demand, you might try using Google, as in my last post.

 

[jwtaylor]

Use Google Advanced search.

Put your search phrase in to the top section and in the 'Need more tools" section "Search within a site or domain: www.woodenboat.com/forum" to search this forum.

John