Cycling UK Forum

Searching for "Bow" returns (for me) *no* results whatsoever.
The same search on Google returns over 400 messages from this site.

I've noticed the search was erratic in the past, but surely the search facility is meant to work?

It might help if threads could be tagged, like on Twitter and blog sites. Sometimes it's just really hard to know what to search for.

I found I started getting better results when I searched on stage at a time ie search on a single word, then, search within those results. Having said that, I rarely if ever do a speculative search in that having been a forum regular for quite a while, I've a pretty good idea of what there is on the subjects that mostly interest me, so I'm usually looking for something I know is there.

I get frustrated by the speed with which the internet page with a list of results will expire while the results themselves are being checked.

Alex L wrote:You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 4 characters and must not contain more than 84 characters excluding wildcards.

That is reassuring. Could you point me to the source of your information (I did try searching for it)? It might tell me whether I can somehow use boolean operators, exclude terms, and use literal strings.

If you go to "FAQ" - the button is towards the upper right of my screen in this format, there is a detailed section on searching the forum about halfway down the right hand column.

For example: search.php?keywords=hi&terms=any&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=posts&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

It would be possible to fix this issue but I don't know what resources CTC has and who runs the forums.

Resources are limited so I try to stick to standard phpBB3 functionality. I agree that the Forum's search isn't the most powerful, but it sort-of works. The trouble with indexing short words is that the index becomes massive.

In an ideal world we'd have Apache Solr search, but no-one has integrated that with phpBB3 yet. It's non-trivial to set up, but would be very powerful!

Forum posts quite often come up in relevant Google searches, so that might be another way to find things?

Alex L wrote:

You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 4 characters and must not contain more than 84 characters excluding wildcards.

The only time I've tried to use Search was for "CTC" and of course, it wouldn't let me