I am use to Enclosing words in Quotes and Boolean Logic. I have been unable to figure out what makes the SDMB search function work.
As an example, If I do a vanity Search, I have tried:
“What Exit”
“What Exit?”
What+Exit
What + Exit
What & Exit
I tried search for **Search Secrets ** and I got back useless hits.
So please if you know any search secrets/tricks, share them. If you know a good past thread please point us to it.
Mildly Frustrated,
Jim
My best secret is to not use the search engine at all, when I can avoid it. Often, I’m looking for old classic threads. These are very often Threadspotted, in which case you can usually find them in the Threadspotting archive faster than through the Board search engine.
Another trick, if you’re looking for a thread which was inordinantly long, or viewed a very great number of times, is that you can sort the forum pages by number of views or replies. Just click the word “Replies” or “Views” at the top of the respective columns, and set the date range to “From the beginning”. The threads with the highest scores will show up at top.
It’s been a long time since I’ve used this version of vBulletin from the admin side, but I think certain common words (like “what”) are automatically excluded from search results, so I don’t think you’ll have much luck with a vanity search. I don’t either, of course. I knew I should have gone with Slacker2KBX9er.
Just for kicks I posted the words “what exit” and tried to search for it on my (vBulletin 3.5) forum, and it didn’t work too well. If I just searched for the words without the quotes, it returned 501 instances of the word “exit” (including my test post), and said it ignored “what” as too common.
Searching for “what exit” in quotes returned nothing at all.
I also tried an example search here on the SDMB a while ago but it’s still working on it. I’ll get back to you tomorrow on that one. 
What, & Who, almost any 3 letter word will get ignored.
I was hoping that someone knew of what search logic Vbullentin employed.
It is possible that there is no boolean logic. That is what I am hoping to find out. I’m sure a lot of others do fruitless searches and get useless results and thus tie up the servers resources.
Jim
Yeah boolean stuff works. The default is “AND,” so if you just type “hello slacker” or “hello AND slacker” it’ll return every thread that contains both of those words. If you search for “hello OR slacker” it’ll return every thread that contains either one of those words.