Forum search is pants

Is it me - or is the forum search facility a bit crap?

Just put in "chamber" and "most recent topics" to look for the recent Big Chambers 3D scanning thread - nothing relevent came up and most recent article was 2010....

cavermark said:

Is it me - or is the forum search facility a bit crap?

Just put in "chamber" and "most recent topics" to look for the recent Big Chambers 3D scanning thread - nothing relevant came up and most recent article was 2010....

Click to expand...

Remember it's using a standard search engine (google by default), so instead of treating it like an index, you need to look for words that might appear in the post you're looking for. Searching on "Chambers 3D" gives a 26 June 2014 thread as first hit which might be the one you're looking for. Searching on "chamber" and  "most recent topics" will mean that it's looking for posts which contain as many as possible of the words "chamber most recent topics", not looking for the most recent topics relating to chambers.

Did you try LIDAR or China as search terms?

http://ukcaving.com/board/index.php?topic=16714.0

Mark, as per your search but with "chambers" rather than "chamber" works.

The search would seem to go for an exact match.

kay said:

Remember it's using a standard search engine (google by default), so instead of treating it like an index, you need to look for words that might appear in the post you're looking for. Searching on "Chambers 3D" gives a 26 June 2014 thread as first hit which might be the one you're looking for. Searching on "chamber" and  "most recent topics" will mean that it's looking for posts which contain as many as possible of the words "chamber most recent topics", not looking for the most recent topics relating to chambers.

Click to expand...

Sorry I meant to say I searched for the word chamber and selected "most recent topics" from the "search order" drop down list.
"Most relevent" brought nothing up.  Do all search engines rely on you using exactly the right word as Cookie points out (ie. chambers rather than chamber) ?

cavermark said:

Do all search engines rely on you using exactly the right word as Cookie points out (ie. chambers rather than chamber) ?

Click to expand...

When you're using Google as a stand alone search engine, it will pick up different forms of the word, eg chamber as well as chambers, and also attempts to correct (real and perceived) spelling errors. But it looks as if this facility is turned off if you limit your search to a particular site.

For example, going to Google and searching for
chamber 3d site:.ukcaving.com
chambers 3d site:.ukcaving.com
give different results, and give exactly the same results in each case as if you searched from inside ukcaving for chamber 3d or chambers 3d.

If on the other hand you search for
chamber 3d ukcaving
you get results for both chamber and chambers (and, of course, a whole lot of other results that aren't on ukcaving)

Yeah, slightly annoying how google doesn't like to accept bolean operators from the home page anymore, instead using them as search terms or correcting your sentence

Any recommendations on a good website about "how to use search engines" anyone?  (No doubt some clever sod will put a link to "Let me google that for you")!