"Forum Search" up the spout?

[#1]

This was raised in PUGIT as item 369 on Sept 24th. 
Current status 8 Votes ?
No response from Plusnet so far.
If you do go across to the Usergroup to vote (Link above) remember to set up your 'prefs' first if you're a new visitor.  (Use the purple 'prefs' tab near the top of the screen.
MauriceC

[#2]

The search has never worked correctly for me as well. 

[#3]

The search engine is not picking up the old posts from PlusNet's old forum.  This search engine is a pane, it is time to dump this search engine and get a new search engine. 

[#4]

As has been announced elsewhere, PlusNet have still to complete the administrative work involved with moving posts from the old forums over to Community.
Waiting until (say) the end of November before commenting on any omissions could be beneficial all round.

[#5]

I've noticed that multi-word searches seem to be more reliable for me.
For example:

• "homephone" lists a lot of false finds.


• "home phone" lists only correct finds.


• So, adding another likely word helps eg "homephone BT".


• But using a common word (like "the") for the extra second word doesn't help, as it seems to get filtered out of the search. eg "homephone the" works the same as "homephone".

[#6]

Here's an example of a recent "hot topic" - a multi-word search to boot! Try
interpret postini headers
Now can you explain how that fails to find a post that contains:
interpreting in the subject and interpret in the body
Postini in the subject and TEN times in the body
headers in the subject and SIX times in the body
Searching for all words finds no matches, any words doesn't find the post linked above.

[#7]

A fix would be truly wonderful.
As I have a life - I don't have time for manual searches and since the old forums have been imported I find it impossible to do any meaningful searching.

[#8]

I'm not that bothered about posts over a month old - usually I'm looking for posts which I remember seeing in the last two or three weeks.

[#9]

Quote from: jelv

Now can you explain how that fails to find a post that contains: interpreting in the subject and interpret in the body Postini in the subject and TEN times in the body headers in the subject and SIX times in the body Searching for all words finds no matches, any words doesn't find the post linked above.

So much for the multi-word theory...
It must be pretty frustrating when you know a post is there and you just want to find it...
...and it didn't find this post either.
I tried a few other word combinations but they wouldn't throw up the missing posts either, though the previous post to the above linked one did show up (searching for 'postini').
Just to play with the multi-word 'theory' a bit more, "interpret headers" seems to give something that 'looks' OK (but only because it doesn't include the list of extra messages). It also doesn't include the two known messages that should be there.
For info, "phone interpret", "phone "headers", "home headers" and "BT headers" give results without the list of extra messages.
So, perhaps:
1. There are some words that are successfully getting into a word index and others don't.
and
2. Some messages are being included in the search and others not.

[#10]

I *think* it's not emptying the search cache... at least, it starts working when I tell it to do it manually.

[#11]

Time for a visit to http://www.simplemachines.org/

[#12]

I've tried that, unfortunately. I may try again, now that I may have worked out the cause of our poor searches.
I may be forced to cron a task to login and pretend to be me every so often and do it (or find out what happens when I click a magic link and just do it server side).

[#13]

Any update from PlusNet regarding the "broken" search facility?

[#14]

The latest update is essentially what I said in the update on the front page of the Community Site:

Quote

One of the major problems with the forums is that searching doesn't work well. We have plans to replace this with our Google Mini box, and we've built a (completely un-styled) interface to this at http://community.beta.plus.net/google/. This gives you the opportunity of searching the forums, the blogs or both meaning that you can also find all material relating to a specific subject.

[#15]

Shall we just change the search link to use the beta one for the minute?  It's loads better.
(just a little ugly)