Forum Search

[cwnoah]

I searched "smart phone" in the forum, and apparently it strips quotes, because the keywords showed smart phone, and the search results were the same for both. How do I get the forum to search for a literal set of keywords, rather than individually?

I put this in General Configuration Questions rather than Report Forum Issues, because this forum seems to have the most activity, and probably the best chance of getting an answer. I didn't cross-post because that's poor etiquette, and maybe not even permitted.

3dcart-Henry, can you help?

[Pack Secure]

Sometimes I have to literally go to google and put my question in and add 3dcart to the question to get to the correct thread. Not the best solution, but it has worked.

[cwnoah]

Thanks Pack Secure. I hadn't thought of doing it that way. Pretty embarrassing for 3dcart, yes?

[cwnoah]

Anybody from 3dcart?
3dcart-Alex 3dcart-Carlos 3dcart-Geronimo 3dcart-Henry 3dcart-Walter

[Shift4Shop-Henry]

Hi Charlie,

Using quotes on a search string to limit results is not functional on the vBulletin search. Instead they have a different way of narrowing down results.

If you look at the top right of the forum here and click on the small, downward pointing arrow to the right of the search bar, you'll have an option to do an advanced search.
In the advanced search page, there will be a link labeled "Search Tips" which will bring up the following popup.

http://images.3dcartstores.com/KB_Im...searchTips.png

According to that popup, it looks like vBulletin limits the search terms to exclude words or include words. However it's still treats each separate word as a viable search term.
To explain it differently, there doesn't seem to be a way of connecting multiple words to be used as an exact phrase.

So if you're searching for forum posts and you'd like to search for Smart Phone but remove anything with tablets, you would search for:

Smart Phone -Tablet

The minus sign will filter out "Tablet" but you'd still get results for Smart and Phone separately.
On the other hand, if you'd like to search for posts including the words Smart and Phone but also include results with Mobile you can add an OR to the search string like this:

Smart Phone OR Mobile

The result would be results for any postings including the phrases Smart, Phone, or Mobile. However, regardless of how the search string is composed, it seems to be considering each word a search term.

The advanced search does appear to also let you narrow down searches for things like date ranges, tags, member names and other functions, so some of those options might be useful to you as well.

Please understand however that the forum is powered by a 3rd party software (vBulletin) and we're sometimes limited by its functionality. I'll be the first to admit that the built in search it uses isn't the greatest, but I'm afraid it's the one we're stuck with at the moment because it's what comes with the vBulletin install.

Hopefully the Advanced Search works better for you. For very specific searches though, I have to side with Pack Secure on this and endorse the suggestion to use google.

[cwnoah]

Hi 3dcart-Henry,

Thanks for your very detailed response. I will try the Advanced Search to see if it helps. I am also going to research vBulletin to see if there are any settings you could use to improve it. I say this because, when BC went to another search (for site search, but the same principles apply), they could have changed some of their settings to make the search far better. Naturally, when I told them about these settings, they totally ignored me. From my experience so far, 3dcart will listen and evaluate any suggestions offered.

[3dcartadmin]

We've just enabled a new search on vbulletin that seems to be far better. It's still indexing, but the results so far look promising.

[cwnoah]

That is fantastic! I'd be happy to help test it when you're ready. Just let me know.