Forum Searching

What happened to the advanced search options, the current search facility is driving me mad as it brings up far to many irrelevant results as rather than searching for a quoted string i.e. "my important search terms" it actually searched for all instances of each individual term which is a nightmare when you are trying to find references to a specific error message.

For instance try searching for "The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts" as a quoted string in the ecart forum and you get 500 results !! the majority of which are useless

Can we please, please have a proper search facility.

I agree with Dave. Although I always thought this was a vBulletin shortfall. I don't know that, it's just what I thought.

Advanced searching is still possible through this page:
search.php

But as john says, this is really a vBulletin issue.

To be honest, I very rarely use the Search functions of vBulletin, instead, I use an advanced google search and constrain it to the webassist.com/forums site by entering
site:webassist.com/forums

in the google search box.

so to search for your string:
"The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts"

I would enter the following in the google search box:
site:webassist.com/forums "The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts"

Nice tip, thanks

The "advanced" search page is the one that I was using but the fact that it lacks even the basic search for a quoted string means that it is not very advanced at all

How are newbies supposed to find anything if a WCE can't ? Does vBulletin not have a search module or add-on that will do a better job ?

Dave, I just tried searching using the advanced search screen and the search phrase:
"The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts"

including double quotes and it only returned 5 results. see the attached screen shot.

humm, that is not my experience at all

what settings do you use on the advanced search page ?

I enter:

"The totals of the cart item amounts do not match order amounts"

in the keywords box, and click the search button. no other settings are changed.

That said, I have had erratic results with the advanced search feature. I'll log this in our bug base to have it looked into, but I cant say what will come of it.

That's exactly what I do and I get 500 results, oh well I will use your tip about google search in future when trouble shooting errors

yeah, I find Google Search much more reliant.

Bit late getting back to this but I also find, as Dave does, that enclosing a search phrase in quotes makes no difference to a search. Each individual word is looked up resulting in a lot of results which then need to be sifted by eye so to speak. I've found the same on other vBulletin forums which is why I mentioned that it might be a vBulletin thing.

But that Google idea from you Jason is a good'n, I'll use that in future.

EDIT: Just tried Dave's search in quotes and, like him, got 500 results.