Advanced Search

[garyde]

Hi Ray. I put a Guest charger on my batterries and it works great. Call me for info.

[aggies09]

Just my experience, but without doubt, every time i have tried to search a specific topic I get all kinds of threads that have nothing to do with what i am searching for. I am not beyond operator error, but I have found the search function mostly worthless.

[Ray Davis]

Ray, your the computer expert, but I keyed in guest charger and got 26 posts with about as much guest charger information as I could stand.

I don't get it.. What do you want it to do?

Out of how many incorrect threads? I just did exactly the same search, it comes up with 100 threads. Clicking through each of the top 10 threads, not one was about Guest Chargers. They all had the word charger in the thread, but not guest, nor guest charger.

I want to be able to search with more than a single word, and get a result which is limited to posts (or threads) which contain both words. Yes, I was able to find the thread I needed ultimately, but only after sifting through 15-20 threads which had nothing to do with guest charger.

Perhaps since you are an administrator, your search function is different than regular accounts? Maybe that's why we're seeing different results?

Ray

[truk4u]

Hmmm,

I'll defer this one to Skiffer!

[jimtest1]

Adding a tag or tags under the Add/Edit Tags button (lower right when you post a reply or add a thread) will help in the search process.

(Yes that's me I was test some things!)

Jim

[Ray Davis]

Absolutely. Bad news is a large amount of our golden nuggets pre-date the time when the tagging capability was added. But, it's certainly a good thing to remember to do that now, even to older posts.

It's just interesting to me that the older vBulletin software did a much better job searching. I use it on our Pixar support site, and it works very well. Multi-word searches are just not functional here for me.

Ray

[Jon Wehrenberg]

Jeff Bailey had the right idea but to compile the information that is posted it is going to take a team of folks to go through all the posts and cut and paste the golden nuggets.

In between all the horseplay and unrelated remarks this site has a substantial amount of information about dealing with problems, sources for information or parts as well as personal experiences. There are more than enough active members on POG to be able to distribute the responsibility for various categories or threads to make relatively quick work to create a document that can be kept up to date and which could serve as the POG reference book.

But to pull it together someone with the skills necessary to herd cats needs to take control.

[flloyd]

The key problem is the software that runs this site. It's a package known as vBulletin, which I also use on my ham radio website. Frankly stated, vBulletin's search capabilities stink.

I solved this problem on my site by letting Google search the site. The Google search engine can find things that vBulletin can't even attempt. My site has 400,000 members and over a million posts, so some sort of indexing was a must.

To make it possible for Google to do the search, you have to give Google the equivalent of a user account so that it's engine can browse the site. Even though some things can then be found by non-members, they still can't visit the site without being members. It works well.

-fred

[Jim Skiff]

Thanks Ray, Jon & Fred.

I'll see what I can do about getting the Google Search Feature.

Jim