Confused by MoDaCo searching

[Guest Hax]

Ok guys, now I'm not normally this think, :oops: but when I just tried searching for a previous article of mine, I entered the word "alarm" and "alarms" and author "Hax", but the search did not return the topic I was looking for.

I did eventually find it by leaving the search text field empty, the topic lives here and as you can clearly see is titled "Two Alarms???"

So, I then tried searching for "Alarm", "Alarms", "Alarms???", "two" and "Two" and variations of these with an asterisk at hte end for wildcard, but nothing came back.

Can someone enlighten me as to what I am missing here?

Thanks,

Hax

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

"Common" words are occasionally purdged from the database, to reduce results numbers...

See: http://www.modaco.com/viewtopic.php?t=4352

I'd imagine its fairly difficult to get a productive balance between 100's of useless and a few useful hits...

[Guest Lojt]

Theres definatly a problem with the search... i tried to find the original doom thread the other day, but it didn't come up when i searched.

The orignal thread is called 'Uncertified Doom.....ALPHA version' and doesn't come up when you search for 'doom' or 'alpha'.... wierd :roll:

[Guest Hax]

All well and good saying common words are purged from the database, but when I did search for "two" and articles by myself, I did get back two results, just not the one I was looking for :lol:

Have to say that it would be nice if the search would *always* check the topic titles for a match. I agree that the bodies of the messages would often return unwanted results, but returning all topics that matched alarm wouldn't (I think) return too many results.

Just out of curiosity, does the search facility only match *whole* words or does it also match partial words? e.g. if searching for "alarm" would it also return results containing "alarms", "alarmed", etc...?

Cheers,

Hax

[Guest casper508]

Im not too sure how the search works. Have had NO MATCHES when looking for phrases etc. when the phrases were totally appropriate. But using single words always seems to find the correct match, although one has to look for it because of the large number of results.

Cas

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

It would be useful to have a "search topic only", and not the body.

the trouble with phrases is that, depending on which option you select, it will search for any single word in any thread, or the ~exact~ phrase in any thread, which (i personally have) got wrong in the past... :lol: