• Anything ‘published’ on the web is viewed as intellectual property and, regardless of whether it displays a copyright symbol or not, is therefore copyrighted by the originator. The only exception to this is if there is a “free and unrestricted reuse” statement associated with the work.

    In order to protect our members and TFL from possible litigation, all members must abide by the following new rules:

    1. Copying and pasting entire articles from another site to TFL is strictly prohibited. The same applies to articles from print or other media, and to posting photographs taken of copyrighted pages or other media.

    2. Copyright law provides for “fair use” of portions of a copyrighted work. You can copy no more than a SINGLE paragraph from the article to your post (3 or 4 sentences at most).

    3. You must provide a link to the article along with the name of website. For example: ww.xxx.yyy/zzz (The Lower Thumbsuck Daily News).

    4. You must provide, in your own words, a brief summary of the article AND your reasons for believing it will be of interest to TFL members. Failure to do so may result in the thread being closed or your post being deleted as a “cut and paste drive by.”

    5. Photographs and other images are also copyrighted. "Hotlinking" of images (so that it appears in your message) from other sites is also prohibited unless you own rights to the image. If you wish to share an image, provide a clickable link to it.

    Posts that do not follow these new guidelines will be altered or deleted by staff. Members who continue to violate this policy may lose their posting privileges at TFL.

    Thank you for your cooperation and your participation in TFL, the leading online forum for firearms enthusiasts.

Search function questions

P

psyfly

New member
How do I search for a specific reference (similar to "match all words" or "match exact phrase" function)?

Example: (Real attempt). I want to find any reference to "Savage .22 Hi Power".

When I try, I get responses for every savage reference, every .22 reference, every Hi reference, and every power reference. Somewhere in there there may (or may not) be a reference to a Savage .22 Hi Power.

Help.

Thanks,

Will
psyfly on TFL
 
egor20:

Thanks, that helped a lot. The returns appeared to actually be related to my search criteria.

Best,

Will
 
You can also use Google to search TFL. They obviously have a much better search engine than the one here. Simply add "site:thefiringline.com" at the beginning of your Google search string and you will only get returns from this site.
 
Why? Google is lousy for searching forums unless you're searching for an exact phrase.

Google does not have any direct concept of separation between posts. It can only approximate "search for these keywords in one single post" by preferring keywords that are in close proximity.
 
Why? For the very reason psyfly pointed out in his first post. If you search for "Savage .22 Hi Power" here you will get the same results he did, the quotation marks are ignored. If you search for that string with Google, you will get returns with that string in them.

You're not seriously saying that the brain-dead search engine here is better in any way than Google's, are you?
 
Like I said, if you want to match multiple keywords in a single post, that aren't an exact phrase, you're better of using the forum's search engine.

MySQL fulltext search is theoretically better, but it's also deathly slow. vbulletin's native search is much worse, it doesn't honor quote marks either, and it will only guarantee that some of your search terms show up in each search result.

Ideally we should support matching exact phrases too, like google, but I really cannot take on any more projects right now.

This search engine SHOULD be "matching all words", psyfly. If it isn't, give me an example search and I'll look into it. It won't match an exact phrase (that I need to look into... my plate's already way too full), but it will (should) match all your keywords. I ran a search for "savage .22 hi power" and while it didn't honor the exact phrase matching like google would, all the hits that I skimmed seemed to contain all four words.

Mal, the difference with google is that if you do that search without quotes, it will only guarantee that the four words appear on the same PAGE, not the same POST.


Mike, our search engine isn't that bad, is it? You're going to make me cry.

The other options for vbulletin are mysql's default fulltext (not an option for multiple reasons --namely that it's slow and requires myisam tables--, although it DOES do exact phrase search and proximity ranking), and vbulletin's own abortion of a search engine, which is worse on all counts.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top