Faulty Search Feature?

[greyorm]

Anyone else been having this problem: You search for a thread you know the exact title of and author, and yet the Search feature returns "No Results." (ie: try doing a search for "non-silly D&D" or "seven major misconceptions")

I've had this happen more and more lately, though I can find the threads I'm looking for by manually searching through the forums (which often takes a long time, especially for older posts).

It's very frustrating, and obviously I don't know why it would be occuring, but it's made the Search feature essentially useless.  Any ideas, Clinton?  Anyone else able to reproduce this behavior?

[Christoffer Lernö]

If you make a search with "all terms" and then hit the back button (?) to do a new search with "all terms" again seems to reproduce this problem.

It seems like the former "all terms" is stored as a cookie or something (or on the server) and assumed to added to your new search criteria.

For example if I search on "seven major misconceptions" and then push back to search for "Ygg" I get no hits.

However, searching on "major" instead gives me hits.

A workaround is start up a new search by pressing the link or don't use "all terms".

[greyorm]

Thanks Chris, but no go. Still the same behavior.
I've even deleted my cookies and Explorer cache, then closed IE and reopened, but I'm still getting "no results" for threads that definitely exist.

[Christoffer Lernö]

Like I said, it could be on the server then it wouldn't help cleaning the cache. But it does sound weird and more serious than what has happened to me.

[jrs]

I can partially reproduce the behavior described in greyorm's first post.  A search for "non-silly d&d" gets the no results message.  However, I know how to fix this one-- drop the punctuation.  Although it doesn't completely explain the problem, a search for "nonsilly" will get you what you want.  I've discovered that punctuation tends to mess up many search engines, you either need to drop it or substitute a space.  Note that "nonsilly dd" returns no results, hyphen dropout okay but the & seems to be a problem.

The "seven major misconceptions" search is more interesting.  With an all terms search, there are six results, none of which have that topic name.  On the other hand an all terms search on "seven misconceptions" will retrieve the correct topic thread.  Since the word "major" only appears in the topic title and not in any text, I wonder if there is a problem with topic title search.  The search default has this checked, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Julie

[jrs]

Well, I was able to figure out the "nonsilly dd" problem mentioned in my last post by *gasp* RTFM,
http://www.phpbb.com/guide/phpBB_Users_Guide.html#section4_5

Wherein, it states:

The minimum size for words is four characters, and the maximum size is twenty characters.  Any non-alphanumeric character (e.g. white space and punctuation) is a word boundary.

It also states:

Search Previous ... There are also radio buttons here that will allow you to search only the body of posts, or the subject(title) of the posts as well.

Which seems to imply that searches are on individual post's subject lines (which hardly anyone uses) and text, and not the thread topic line.  Can this be confirmed?

Julie

[greyorm]

Searching on "nonsilly d&d" does indeed return the correct thread if you search on "any" -- "all" still results in "No Matches."

Interestingly, I just tried to search on "seven misconceptions" and again received "No Results" (with "all" selected); choosing the same keywords but moving to "any" resulted in matches being made, but none of them being the correct topic.

I mention the latter because Julie was able to find the thread with such a search.

Ok, oddly enough, I just tried it again, and this time, by adding Ron's name in the "Author" field (and doing "all"), I found it, way down on the list.