Ok, the search works for me, BUT it returns crap. We need to be able to do boolean searches and search for a specific combination of words. For example, I was interested in looking up posted info. on the Nismo RS concept's seats and tried to run a search for "Nismo seats" and "Nismo and seats" (as it would be dine in a boolean search), limited it to thread titles only and all I got back was every thread with either "Nismo" or "seats" in the title... utterly useless. With a firum this size and as many posts as there are here, we need to be able to refine searches better. Can this be done?

 

Yes, I also agree that the search feature needs some work. It is an extremely big pain to have to wade through pages and pages of results when all you're looking for is one specific thing.

 

Yes, the search engine does not work like before where it will search for all the keywords instead of "any" of the keywords. I wish it can go back to the old way.

 

if you have a premier account you can then do the searches via boolean or natural language. We had to move to fulltext index searches due to the vb search crapping out due to how large the forums have grown. Unfortunately another side effect is that boolean searches can get very expensive on the sql side and they are restricted to premier members for that reason.

This is just the normal way of things unfortunately when you grow so large.

 

Are non premier members gonna be able to post anymore?

 

Sure,

Just some things are restrictive, you don't find a lot of huge vbulletin boards that do not have the same search problems we do, normally they just disable searching completely. Or they have a high enough income or charge to be able to search.

 

That's the thing that sucks when forums get huge, the search engines get neutered. People can't find what they're looking for so they end up making tons of redundant threads which further strains the system. Recently I tried searching for something that should have returned a few results and I got 20 pages of junk, and then when I searched for something that should have returned 20 pages, I got nothing. Funny how that works.

It seems to me like things could be split up... like have one server for the forums and another server for searches. The search server could also double as a backup. Seems to me that would take a huge load off the forum server while still giving everyone access to a fully functional search engine.

Also, one thing I've noticed with a lot of big forums (which have the same problems), is that the search engines search the entire site from the beginning of time by default. I'm not sure if it matters but it seems like that would potentially waste a lot of resources? Especially for people doing stupid searches. It seems to me like the user should at least be required to refine the search to particular forums so they don't search the entire site just to find something about "brake pads". Obviously there would still be the need to search the entire site, but not by default, and maybe that option could have a more severe throttle??

Just some thoughts and ideas... maybe they are totally retarded but I'm just throwing them out there...

 

Searching is never easy to code right. I get mixed results here but I can understand why certain things show up. You just have to be very specific and wade through the results.

 

I limited the search results at one point to 100 items, but then the flamefest was on for that as well hehe.

We are working solutions but they are expensive and require some custom coding, the initial cost was around 14,000 just for the hardware change to get this done. It's not chump change and very expensive just to be able to search with a bit more accuracy.

 

For those of you who don't know.

How to use google to search these boards put this in google:
site:my350z.com searchword1 searchword2

to search for an exact phrase use quotes e.g. "most expensive"
to exclude results containing a word precede the word with a dash e.g. -bunnies

Hey admins, anyway to maybe add google search to the boards in addition to the regular vBulletin search?