Pistonheads Search Facility

[Top Gear TVR]

The absence of this is a major loss and causes lots of repeat messaging, questions and queries. Do you have any plans to re-instate it yet?

[NiceCupOfTea]

I just came in here to post the same. It's incredibly frustrating. I'm trying to sort a problem on my car at the moment and there must be loads of threads on it in the appropriate forum going back 10 years but I'm unable to locate them.

Google search is not much use.

[MattDell]

Top Gear TVR said:

The absence of this is a major loss and causes lots of repeat messaging, questions and queries. Do you have any plans to re-instate it yet?

Not in the immediate future, I'm afraid.

Going to google and appending

site:pistonheads.com

to my search has never failed me, though.

[cuneus]

MattDell said:

Not in the immediate future, I'm afraid.

Going to google and appending

site:pistonheads.com

to my search has never failed me, though.

Why don't you put that on the broken Google search page instead ?

[NiceCupOfTea]

[redacted]

[cuneus]

NiceCupOfTea said:

PH Google search should do that automatically. And you can't search for posts from users, or in particular forums, etc.

It does not

You can search in particular forums

[NiceCupOfTea]

cuneus said:

It does not

You can search in particular forums

Thatcs what I'm saying.

How?

[cuneus]

For a forum search:

princess siteistonheads.com/gassing/ wedges

[jamieboy]

When the PH search was working, I could type 'Alfa' in the search box, sort the results by date, and I'd have a list of all the recent relevant threads - each thread listed once.

How do I do that with the Google search?

[All that jazz]

jamieboy said:

When the PH search was working, I could type 'Alfa' in the search box, sort the results by date, and I'd have a list of all the recent relevant threads - each thread listed once.

How do I do that with the Google search?

You can't. Google caches them however it feels at the time.

Personally I find the google search to siteistonheads.com pretty poor. I can search for a lot of specific stuff that's been discussed within the past 3 months say and google rarely finds any of it. The content is plenty old enough for it to have been spider crawled too.

[Cockey]

cuneus said:

For a forum search:

princess siteistonheads.com/gassing/ wedges

I can't get this to work. Really wish I could narrow the search down to a particular part of the forum (Tuscan) as I'm having real trouble finding some of the posts I've previously read. All of which I found quite easily before.

For example, if I searched for "Tuscan Decat", a load of relevant posts would come up. If I do it now, I can hardly find any!
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/gsearch.asp?q=t...

[miniman]

Cockey said:

I can't get this to work. Really wish I could narrow the search down to a particular part of the forum (Tuscan) as I'm having real trouble finding some of the posts I've previously read. All of which I found quite easily before.

For example, if I searched for "Tuscan Decat", a load of relevant posts would come up. If I do it now, I can hardly find any!
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/gsearch.asp?q=t...

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=site%3Awww.pistonheads.com%2Fgassing%20tuscan%20decat&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&fp=1821ba54f6c138b6&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1550&bih=811

[miniman]

As an aside, question for the PH techies: why don't you just replace the current "Google search" box on the PH search page with one that simply sends the url

site:www.pistonheads.com/gassing +search term here

to Google?

[Cockey]

miniman said:

Cockey said:

I can't get this to work. Really wish I could narrow the search down to a particular part of the forum (Tuscan) as I'm having real trouble finding some of the posts I've previously read. All of which I found quite easily before.

For example, if I searched for "Tuscan Decat", a load of relevant posts would come up. If I do it now, I can hardly find any!
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/gsearch.asp?q=t...

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8&ion=1#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=site%3Awww.pistonheads.com%2Fgassing%20tuscan%20decat&oq=&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&fp=1821ba54f6c138b6&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1550&bih=811

Thanks!! That's much better

[BingoBob]

It's so frustrating. It's come to the point that when I see the the PH search function is working I am a bit shocked!

The google search, even with the qualifiers, is next to useless. What is the issue with the search facility? Can it be that difficult? Is it to do with server resources?

Why not abandon this behemoth of a forum and go to tried and tested forum software like phpBB?

[MattDell]

BingoBob said:

It's so frustrating. It's come to the point that when I see the the PH search function is working I am a bit shocked!

The google search, even with the qualifiers, is next to useless. What is the issue with the search facility? Can it be that difficult? Is it to do with server resources?

Why not abandon this behemoth of a forum and go to tried and tested forum software like phpBB?

The problem is the size of the forum and the technology we have available. We're upgrading things, starting with the classifieds. But until then the existing MySQL search isn't going to work for us.

And phbBB (or any off the shelf software) would never work on a forum this size.

-Matt

[Cockey]

Can I suggest you amend the PH search to use siteistonheads.com/gassing rather than just siteistonheads.com? Half my recent posts could've been avoided had I used the /gassing search.

[AL001]

An essential feature lost, to "upgrade" something that works far better as is.

Welcome to the world of IT.

[miniman]

AL001 said:

An essential feature lost, to "upgrade" something that works far better as is.

Welcome to the world of IT.

Have you tried the new classifieds beta?

[BingoBob]

I presume it's because the classified ads generate revenue. It's understandable. If there was no money coming in, what would pay for the forum bit?

Doesn't change the fact that having no search facility is a major PITA.