Where to post a question about searching? How to search "exact" match?

[Shawn Murphy]

Perhaps it's really not possible with the search functions we have here, but for some reason I can't figure out how to search for an exact phrase, e.g. I'm looking for any references to a book title, "In the Blink of an Eye"

Quotes don't work, adding a '+' sign to each word doesn't work... now I'm left to searching by the author's last name (assuming it's relatively unique and is referenced in a post).


well, the last name search returned a lot of results (fortunately it was 'Murch' and not 'Smith'!), so, after culling through them I found what I was looking for:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...&threadid=5501

If there's an easier way, any suggestions are greatly appreciated.


~Shawn

[Rob Lohman]

The current search system in this version of the forum software does not
allow for phrase searches, however, there are ways to narrow your search
down.

For example:

Right click on the word search in the bar above and open in new window
(or go to advanced search manually). For keywords enter: blink eye

Then in the forum list select only the "read about it" forum

4 of those 5 threads specifically talk about that book, the fifth just mentions
it. I find these results pretty good.

If I enter the same keywords: "blink eye" and do not narrow it down to a
forum I get two pages of threads with 16 hits in total. Not too bad either.

Or if I enter just "blink eye murch" I get 7 threads across the complete board.

So there are ways to reduce the results produced by the search. I do agree
that an exact phrase search would be a good thing to have. Unfortunately it
is not supported in vBulletin 3 at the moment.

[Chris Hurd]

Thanks, Rob!

The current search tool in vB3 (this board's software) is admittedly somewhat limited but it's better now than it has been in previous versions. We're constantly looking for ways to improve it, though. Please hang in there,