Search Trouble

zoobyshoe

Every once in a while when I try to search old posts or threads the things tells me there were no matches found. Sometimes that turns out to be because I am not remembering the exact word someone used, but at others it seems to be because the search engine is on strike. I just tried searching "Einstein" for the username "zoobyshoe" and was told there were no matches, despite the fact I must have written it in a hundred posts.

Any ideas about any obvious mistakes I might be making, or does the search engine really have problems sometimes?

Greg Bernhardt

I'm aware of this, search is disabled. I'm in the process of switching from vb search to mysql fulltext search and it's taking longer than expected.

zoobyshoe

Hmmm. What is funny is that I just tried the "Einstein" search again, in case I'd misspelled anything before, and was presented with the above post as the only match. It seems to have lost it's long term memory.

Greg Bernhardt

Or that I purged the post index yesterday

zoobyshoe

OK. I just wanted to be sure it wasn't me doing something weird I didn't realize.

Moonbear

If you're searching for an older thread (it doesn't always work for something very recent), use google instead. Just include PhysicsForums as part of the search (write it as all one word and it'll match the URL for this site). It works pretty well for me.

zoobyshoe

You mean like: physicsforumszoobyshoeeinstein ?

Evo

physicsforums zoobyshoe einstein, but I doubt it would pull up all of the posts.

Moonbear

It does a pretty good job. I can usually find the threads I'm looking for that way. Those spiders crawling around here are pretty busy.

mattmns

Try this instead at google:


zoobyshoe einstein site:physicsforums.com

neutrino

Thanks for the search tips, guys.