Too Many Irrelevant Search Hits

**jMon54** · 02-09-2005, 03:30 PM

Whenever I search in this forum I get tons of disorganized hits many of which seem irrelevant. Where can I find tips on how to get better search results?

**ThomasX** · 02-09-2005, 04:13 PM

Yes, please answer him. I have the same problem.

**pureone** · 02-09-2005, 04:35 PM

change the type of searches. for instance you can search just certain parts of the forums, search for certain peoples posts (authors mainly). or you can just click peoples profiles (say your looking for a certain post) and just have a look at all the posts they have made.

phpbb search function for the forum is not that great but you can experiment with it to to get better results. you could even use google. the google bots tend to come here very quick and cache alot of topics.

**Cuddles** · 02-09-2005, 04:57 PM

Good suggestions, pureone, I would also suggest adding more information on your search querries...

Like this:
search for "root"
search for "root password"
search for "changing root password"
...etc...

The more "details" you provide on your search, the lower your "hits" are going to be, and hopefully, the hits you do get, will be more closely to what you are looking for...

Another example:
search "video"
search "nvidia"
search "nvidia geforce4 mx440"

the first will probably get you TONS of hits, whereas, the more "specific", last search, will possibly only give you 50 or so ( the nvidia card is a popular one, I even have it

)

Hope this helps,
Ms. Cuddles

**Harry Kuhman** · 02-09-2005, 07:54 PM

In addition to selecting good search terms, the typical Google search concepts apply:

Use a + in front of a term to force the term to be found.

Use a - in front of a term to exclude a term. So if you are looking for network problems when Knoppix is not installed on a hard disk, you might try +network -install (although this is likely to miss some articles, as in this case someone may have used install in a reply and thus caused the article to be excluded. Still, it help for narrowing down searches that get too many hiits.)

Use quotes to search for a phrase rather than individual words. "usb mouse" will find only hit with the phrase "usb mouse", where as usb mouse will find articles that include both words, not both words together (in the second case the words could even have been written by different posters).

Capital letters match only capital letters, lower case letters match capitalized letters or lower case letters. dsl will get more hits than DSL.

You can put OR between two terms to find articles that contain either, as in phlak OR helix.

**jMon54** · 02-10-2005, 02:34 PM

I have been running searches before Google was even on the web. I know a lot about the "how to" part. I just find searching this forum frustrating. I wish I could, for example, search just the Subjects. That would be very useful to me.

**Harry Kuhman** · 02-10-2005, 05:52 PM

Originally Posted by jMon54

I have been running searches before Google was even on the web. I know a lot about the "how to" part. I just find searching this forum frustrating. I wish I could, for example, search just the Subjects. That would be very useful to me.

I didn't mean to insult your experience in doing searches. But since all of the forum subjects lists include the phrase "mark all topics read" and this seldom appears elsewhere, why do you not just force this string as a way to tell the search feature to only return subject pages? Like this, for example, to search for gentoo amoung the subjects.

**pureone** · 02-10-2005, 06:16 PM

when the new version of phpbb comes out i belive the search function will be improved along with alot of other things but that wont be for a few months.

**Cuddles** · 02-10-2005, 06:20 PM

Sweet Harry

Your search returned - 2 hits
Whereas, a search for "gentoo" retuns - 45 hits

I never thought of searching by subject line, but then again, sometimes I dont think the subject lines are very descriptive [weg] ( i.e. HELP! -=- or -=- Need Help, someone? )

**Harry Kuhman** · 02-10-2005, 06:38 PM

Originally Posted by Cuddles

.... but then again, sometimes I dont think the subject lines are very descriptive....

Hi Cuddles, No, I agree with you there. My point was just that if someone did want to limit their searches to the subject pages they could do so with very little extra thought. And in my example I dropped the word "read" from the search string and it was still able to limit to just subject pages; I would be willing to bet with minimal effort I could find an even shorter unique string. So if anyone does want to do this it can be done.

I noted one problem with my example search, but I consider it minor. If you follow the first link returned, you will (no longer) find gentoo on that page. But a little thought will explain that. We have posted so much in the general forum that the gentoo entry has moved to the next page since the search last indexed the pages. So a quick click of the next page link and you have it. Alternately, the search page gives you a good sample of the text for the entry in question. You can just grab a string from that find (such as mount AES256 homedir in Gentoo) and do a search for that string and you will find the article in question.