I have to vent about the forum search feature

[DemiSheep]

Ok, I have tried using the forum search many times to find my old posts and it's quote aggravating. Today I wanted to find my post about Tessa's car sickness issue. Well you can't search for 3 letter words like "car" so I had to type: "ride sick" and luckily the thing came up.

Is there any way to adjust the search feature of this site or is it just a built in thing we all have to put up with. I wonder how many other people have been aggravated by this.

[Hillscreek]

Me too. But I'm just a beginner.

I have tried to look up old posts on various subjects so as not to duplicate stuff too much. I had the same problem with short words and even with phrases.

I know I have asked a lot of questions I could have found out if I'd been a bit cleverer.

[bradl]

Searching can be frustrating, for sure.

The excuses: The main search is built-in. We are on a shared server so I have to be mindful of server load, lest we be shut down. A full-text search on a corpus of 133,000+ posts gets resource intensive fast as the match parameters get broader and broader (that is, requiring fewer and fewer characters). In fact, search is so resource-intensive that we enforce a brief wait period between searches - not just to prevent hostile denial of service by programmatic search abuse but also to cope with ordinary loads.

A possible work-around: while I do use the inbuilt search regularly, I tend to use it for the ability to limit searches (to members, calendar events, or within a single forum). Click the gray box at the right end of the search box at the top of the page to see the choices.

One of the choices is to use google search on the site. That bypasses the in-built search and relies on google's indexing of the site. Google has rather more computing resources available to it than we do, and thus does not enforce a 4-character minimum. Google also indexes Cairn Talk intensively -- I often see topics or posts reflected in google results within *minutes*.

Any time I don't easily find something using the forum search I immediately run a google site search instead, usually from my browser search box or the address bar (for browsers with a hybrid address/search bar). To limit the search to cairnterrier.org, I use the google "site:" operator, like so:

tessa car site:cairnterrier.org

Little-known tip: you can create an automatic google search using google tags, like so:

[google]tessa car[/google]

resulting in

Google: tessa car - ahh, but that search is too wide; let's limit it to Cairn Talk's site by adding the site operator:

[google]tessa car site:cairnterrier.org[/google]

resulting in

Google: tessa car site:cairnterrier.org

Hope this helps a bit. Sorry the built-in search is not a bit more robust.

[DemiSheep]

Thanks Bradl, that helps a lot. I will use the google search drop down from now on.

I used to use the google search feature where you type the subject then "site:www.blah.com" and forgot about that. That would work to.