Forum Search

[phatmanace]

IIRC, there used to be 2 options for search, the "built in" PH one, and the google one - the PH one had lots of options, filter by date, filter by forumns etc. I only now see the google one, is the other one still around?

... Assume it probably is only the google one left, is there a way to restrict by forum, e.g if I wanted to search for "Autopilot", but only care about results in the EV forum, can it be done?

[Ben Lowden]

We dropped our own internal search facility so only have the Google search function now. It is a bit limited, but there are ways to do this sort of search in Google. For instance, you can search:

site: pistonheads.com – plus whatever you want to search. This will then only search PH.

To add to this, you can add the forum ID into the search, which for EV is 247. site: pistonheads.com inurl:f=247 'tesla' will search for Tesla in the EV forum.

In a simpler form:

site: <SITE> limits to results from that site
inurl:<TEXT> further limits to something in the url (for us we can use f=247 as the EV forum identifier)
'autopilot' will search exact text. If you remove the quotes and/or add a space e.g. auto pilot or autopilot you get more inclusive results

Sorry it's not a perfect solution, but hopefully that helps.

[phatmanace]

cool. thanks.

Out of interest, why did you drop the internal one? just too expensive to maintain?

[dhutch]

Super toss.

Maybe PH could develop a form which had dropped downs for forum areas and other criteria, and then used the Google engine to produce the results?

Or any other method to have what ultimate is a basic necessity to any forum.

Daniel

[Ben Lowden]

I think it was pretty buggy and didn't work all that well, so the simplest solution was for us to drop it and just use the Google search functionality instead.

[Mr Pointy]

For me the biggest issue is the lack of any last post date filtering as the Google search seems to order a bit randomly. Is there any way to order a search by last post date?

[Ben Lowden]

Mr Pointy said:

For me the biggest issue is the lack of any last post date filtering as the Google search seems to order a bit randomly. Is there any way to order a search by last post date?

Not at the moment I'm afraid.

[dhutch]

Sigh

[phatmanace]

Mr Pointy said:

For me the biggest issue is the lack of any last post date filtering as the Google search seems to order a bit randomly. Is there any way to order a search by last post date?

Google can't look inside the semantics of the pages, beyond a straight text match. So it can see the "URL" and it can see the text, which is why you can do the basic searches

... but for things where you actually have to understand the contents of the search, that is something that would need to be PH specific. So google won't be able do things like "last post date", or "only posts quoting person ABC" - therefore the loss of the built in search from PH will be the loss of those kinds of features... alas..

[dhutch]

Surely google can usually sort by the age of the page? Or does a forums databased makeup prohibit that?

[phatmanace]

I would guess google will always see the page (which is the .asp page) as being the same - what you really mean probably is the thread age (either last post, or first post) - but I again, I think google would need to see "into" the data and parse it for that to work, which I guess it probably doesn't do.