The search function of this board is bloody awful. To take an example, I remembered a thread about infantry squares from a few years back and literally hours of searching led me nowhere, not helped by the fact I could do a search once every 2 minutes (better than the 5 minute delay we had earlier). But one google search and its the first hit, even with the typo in the search key. Indeed, I have started doing this in preference to our own search. Now I do not want to say that I expect us to match the Lords of Internet at Google, but surely we can expect better results from our search functions than we have had thus far.
If you append “site:x.com” to your google search query, it will search only in website x.com. I add “site:boards.straightdope.com” in google to whatever I need to search on this board. And then, if I click on search tools on google page, I can see the search results for last year, month, week or 24 hrs.
This. With google searches as described, who needs to know or care about on-board searches here?
On-board searches are useful because you can look for posts with a keyword, whereas Google indexes entire thread pages. The keyword may be too common for the Google search to be useful, yet usable when the search has other conditions, e.g. a 2nd word or poster name. So, yes, the on-board search will often achieve purposes hard or impossible with Google.
I have other complaints about on-board search:
[ul][li] Showing entire post in results (as is done by Idle Thought’s board) rather than excerpts would be very nice.[/li][li] Some short words are rare and useful, yet forbidden.[/li][li] “Joe” in “Originally Posted by Joe” doesn’t match; it should.[/li][li] Two-minute delay is not enough. I understand that throttles are needed, but throttling to five searches per day would please me more than 1 search per 2 minutes.[/li][li] If the two-minute limit cannot be changed, messages should lie and pretend the delay is 130 seconds, not 120 seconds! It’s not unusual that I get the message: “Try again in 1 second.” (If the intent is to remind poster of how naive software is, leave it.)[/li][/ul]
If this vBulletin works like the others vBulletins I’ve been on, it indexes posts base on whole words that are four letters long or longer.
So, you can’t search for “bat”.
And a search for “desk” will not show “desks”.
Because of the length of time between searches, I’m not going to be bothered to test if those rules apply here.