A forum Search for 'hyatt.com' turns up 28629 results

[therube]

A forum Search (here) for 'hyatt.com' turns up 28629 results.

I'd think that to be in error.


'abc.com' turns up a more reasonable, 25.

[billmcct]

I searched hyatt.com and it only shows this post.

[andyprough]

It somehow searched for '.com', which right now is returning 28,633 results:

Screenshot from 2024-03-15 13-41-49.png

[athenian200]

The forum search on here kinda sucks. No offense to MC, it's a long-standing phpBB problem and not something he can do much to fix.

You're basically better off trying to search the posts on the forum via an external search engine, than using the built-in search. It's almost unusable and won't let you get very specific about what you're searching for. It searches for every individual term and "helpfully" omits words that are too short or too common, preventing you from looking for acronyms or phrases that include short words. It works best when searching for a long, single word that is fairly unique and not repeated too often.

Well, maybe some people can use it effectively, if they are wizards at constructing proper search strings in a way that phpBB forum search will respond well to (a niche skill indeed), but I know for sure that I can't use it and get the results I want, even if I know for sure the post exists and what phrase it contains.

Other strategies that can help are looking for the thread that contains the post you want and searching within that thread, or trying to narrow it down by user and date and then searching for a fairly common word you know the post contains, because then you don't have too many results to look through.

[Moonchild]

I think the only real way to improve this would be to use sphinx fulltext (phpBB does support that) but it's a total PITA to set up and maintain (I never got auto-merging of deltas to work with it when I looked at it and I don't want to have to re-index every day). I'm currently using phpBB native (i.e. a PHP-maintained index). I could try to use the MariaDB back-end but I found it to be kind of unpredictable how it responds since the MySQL search isn't exactly as intuitive to feed, but I could try that, if you want to give that a go.

That being said I just did a search for hyatt.com and it only popped up this thread. so I'm not sure where your out of bounds number comes from.

[suzyne]

I was wanting search the forums, and thought I would try the tip of using an external search engine.

You're basically better off trying to search the posts on the forum via an external search engine, than using the built-in search.

I find it incredible that the phrase new tab hasn't appeared here, even once! But see what Google returned, can there really be no results?

[athenian200]

I find it incredible that the phrase new tab hasn't appeared here, even once! But see what Google returned, can there really be no results?

Searchresults.png

I knew Google Search had gotten worse over the years in terms of search quality and allowing more specific searches. And was also vaguely aware it kind of discriminated against Pale Moon, but I had no idea it had gotten THIS bad...

Look at my attached screenshot from my preferred search engine, Bing, and compare it to yours from Google...

So does that mean everyone that uses Google search has been having to rely on the forum's built-in search and make it work for them over the years, while I was oblivious because I was using Bing and had the forum actually indexed?

[FranklinDM]

Searching the forum for the terms "new tab" via DuckDuckGo also works fine here: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22new+tab%22 ... oon&ia=web

[suzyne]

Look at my attached screenshot from my preferred search engine, Bing, and compare it to yours from Google...

Searching the forum for the terms "new tab" via DuckDuckGo also works fine

I am truly shocked by the differences. This has left me speechless.

[Enobarbous]

I am truly shocked by the differences. This has left me speechless.

You shouldn't)
robots.txt

Code: Select all

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

Related topic
While I'm not happy about it, but... The right of the forum owner

So does that mean everyone that uses Google search has been having to rely on the forum's built-in search and make it work for them over the years

Yes We must suffer

[athenian200]

So does that mean everyone that uses Google search has been having to rely on the forum's built-in search and make it work for them over the years

Yes We must suffer

Well, I am glad to hear that it was MC's choice, I thought Google had ramped up on the censorship so much that our forum wasn't even indexed anymore... I guess I never noticed he blocked it because I never used Google to begin with. LOL.

[suzyne]

Related topic
While I'm not happy about it, but... The right of the forum owner

That thread was most illuminating and helpful to read! Thanks for the link, because it explains everything.

[therube]

That being said I just did a search for hyatt.com and it only popped up this thread. so I'm not sure where your out of bounds number comes from.

It looks like if a search does not actually find a specific hit, it finds all OR'd hits?
So initially, "hyatt.com" did not exist in these forums, so (for me, at the time) 28629 results were returned.

Now that "hyatt.com" does exist in the forums, only this 1 thread is found.


So, change the search to something like, 'hyattXXX.com' - which does not exist in these forums (until I actually post this post), & with that, I'm seeing 28653 hits.

So I searched for "hyattXXX.com", & the board parsed it to a search of "hyattXXX" "com" (two terms, OR'd it must be) & it found 0 results on the 'hyattXXX' end & 28653 results on the 'com' end (I'm guessing).

And once I post this, hyattXXX.com will no longer return a high number of results, but you could try hyattXYZ.com - oops, but then that will no longer work either .
.

Palemoon hyatt search.png

[Moonchild]

I'm pretty sure that was intentional by the phpBB designers. I can see the logic being "if there are no hits, make the search query interpretation more broad" because that would make sense for a "natural language" search. first try exact matches, if 0, then try a less constrained search. This may even be something php does internally, I don't know.

[moonbat]

Use advanced search, search within the subject and set it to return results as topics, not posts. That's if you want to see discussions about the topic you're looking for as opposed to every single instance of that keyword everywhere sans context.