Experimental feature upgrade - search engine based forum search.

bubba

Administrator
As most long term forum users are aware, the built in forum search functionality leaves a lot to be desired.

About the only thing that it had going for it was that it was context sensitive depending upon where you were inside the forum. This would have been useful if it actually consistently returned any meaningful results...which it often didn't.  If you really wanted to find something most of us would go to a search engine and use site:ukcaving.com etc

The other problem with the built-in search is that every time somebody searched for a new word or phrase, it added that search to a database table which has now got millions of records in it. It goes without saying that this is a performance hog.

So, as an experiment I've updated the search box at the top right of the page so that you can use one of three major search engines to search for results from the site instead of the built-in system.  No real need to explain, but just put in your keyword, select your search-engine and click the button.

I suspect that once you start to use it you'll find it far more useful than the old system, but as this is currently only experimental, it's not certain yet whether this will be kept permanently.

If you still want to use the built-in forum search, you can still get to it from the "search" menu under where your avatar is :)
 

graham

New member
Interesting stats I saw on t'net  in the this morning where it said that Bing has dropped to 4th most used search engine in the world. Google (boo hiss) is still number one, the Chinese have #2 and the Russians now have #3. DuckDuckGo is nowhere globally, but I'm glad that you included it.
 

JasonC

Well-known member
Thanks for that, Bubba.  I hadn't heard of DDG before, but I've now added it to my Chrome bookmarks bar - remains to be seen if Google antibodies kill it off....

This is just a thought, but at least a couple of forum users use EClick, with proceeds going to CRO.  I'm not sure if it does site-restricted searches, but if so, it could be an idea to add it to the list ?
 

JasonC

Well-known member
Sorry - it's http://www.everyclick.com/.

It pays a pittance to the charity of your choice in exchange for showing you adverts to ignore.  It's not as effective as Google, but works fine for less obscure searches.  I have made the grand total of, er... 11p, for CRO in using it.  Still, better than nowt, I suppose
 

bubba

Administrator
Ah, ok, not seen that before...interesting but not really suitable for a forum search-engine I'm afraid.

I'd rather donate a fiver to CRO than be bugged by a load of ads tbh.
 

ianball11

Active member
Every little helps and my grand total raised is 0.01 in three or so years and my most popular search with it is 'google'  ;)

 

bubba

Administrator
This has been slightly tweaked.

The Google search was returning a lot of mobile-optimised links so I've added search operators to discard wap/wap2/imode results.

Easy enough to tailor by adding or removing the appropriate "inurl" operator if you have need to do so.
 
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