Search engine and random question

[Rudbaeck]

Is there a "forum about the forum" forum? I'm often blinded by my humongous nose and fail to see certain entire forums. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

And to the main topic: Someone PLEASE improve the search engine on these forums to atleast manage simple boolean operators. The current search engine is of less use than tits on a nun, to quote another poster.

[mrjim]

"tits on a nun" nice. I aggree about the search though.

[wacki]

Spiders and crawlers are difficult to design. Ontop of that, there is no beating google. Enter forum name and serch terms into google and it will probably work better. The only problem is that googles spiders tend to have a bit of a time delay. In other words the page has to exist for so many hours before google can index it.

[Rudbaeck]

Well, making an application to make sql queries to a database isn't exactly rocket science.

Finding a post by a certain author which has all of one list of keywords and none from a second list of keywords is like Database Applications 101 first project kinda stuff.



Ok, so the entire bb is just UBB.threads out of the box, but adding a better search engine would be a VAST improvement. There would be so many fewer posts with the same question over and over again because most people DO try to search first, and come up emtpy handed.

[AKQJ10]

[ QUOTE ]
There would be so many fewer posts with the same question over and over again because most people DO try to search first, and come up emtpy handed.

[/ QUOTE ]

Defaulting to "last 7 days" is probably also driving that. One year default backlog might be too much for a forum this busy, but at least "last 30 days" would increase the chances of finding something relevant.

I agree that the booleans are awful, though, and I'm surprised UBB.threads doesn't handle that better. Is that an open-source package like phpBB?