Why does the search engine SUCK?

Then use the KMC Search instead which is far more advanced anyway.

Originally posted by Mišt
How do you use it?

Look, I type in 'Jade Empire' for example, (this is the thread Im looking for: http://www.killermovies.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28388&highlight=jade+empire+forumid%3A66 )

It comes up once in the normal search, on the third page. The rest are just posts mentioning it. I dont want to sit through and look at each page of search results for something that should come up clear as day.

I try the whole 'title:thread title' thing, 'title:Jade Empire' comes up with "Sorry, but no results were found for your search."

Its crap.

Here's the search

Narrow it down further by using the usename option.

See, I use the one at the bottom of the forum pretty much exclusively, and with that the only time I can't find the exact thread I'm looking for is if it's misspelled.

then maybe im just stupid....

it never seems to work for me

Originally posted by Raz
Here's the search

Oh you used brackets, see nobody mentioned that....cheers👆

The new engine uses Lucene as a backend.

The full query syntax can be found here: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html

You can use postid, title, userid, pagetext, dateline and threadid as fields for queries.

Maybe someone could write a guide we could sticky?

Question: If you use the 'title: (thread title)', does that search for exactly what you have typed in, or does it search for keywords? I tried to find another thread today but I wasnt sure what the exact name of it was, and I couldnt find it on any of the other searches.

I don't think you need to use brackets... I did and it didn't bring anything up. I mean, I searched the OTF using 'title:the gentlemans club' and that seemed to work well enough. But when I tried the brackets as well it found nothing shrug

If you type in title:the gentlemans club - then it will search for "the" in the title and "gentlemans" and "club" in either the title or a post.

Correct way would be to use title:"the gentlemans club" to search for that exact phrase or title:[i](the gentlemans club)[/i] for those terms in the title in any order.

Originally posted by Raz
If you type in title:the gentlemans club - then it will search for "the" in the title and "gentlemans" and "club" in either the title or a post.

Correct way would be to use title:"the gentlemans club" to search for that exact phrase or title:[b][i](the gentlemans club)[/i] for those terms in the title in any order. [/B]

Ok, but as I said, the first thing I searched for was title:[i](the gentlemans club)[/i] and it found nothing. So I tried title:the gentlemans club and, as you said, it brought up the thread itself and other places where it had been mentioned. So if I used title:"the gentlemans club" it will search for the title as a whole?

I was just wondering why the use of brackets found nothing.

Hmm, got to concur with Syren on this one Raz; neither brackets nor quote marks find the thread. They find Mech's old one though.

Edit: Ah, but Gentleman (without the s) does work.

Is it possible that the apostrophe in "Gentleman's Club" (which Mech's one did not have) is throwing it? The search does not work with or without the apostrophe but that really only backs the suspicion.

Actually I think I know why that example doesn't work.

The lack of the apostrophe in the search term (which is in the actual thread title) might do it.

Type in title:"the gentleman's club" and it comes up with it, I just checked.

Though...hmmm. That only works if you use the search at the bottom of the forum.

No, that's not it. If you search in the forum using the quote marks it finds the words in the body text, not the title, in what is meant to be a literal title-only search. The 'title' part of the search seems to have become redundant when used like that.

That being the case, the reason you only find it when using the search box in the OTF is precisely because it is searching for body text, not title.

It does seem this is not working properly. As it stands it still seems that it cannot find "The Gentleman's Club" by a title search, using parentheses or quote marks, and it may be the fault of the apostrophe.

Apparently.

This is honestly the first time I've actually run into this problem. Huh.

Also, just how long does it take for threads to end up in the search? I've noticed that threads that are less than a month or two old don't come up...

Actually, I am not sure the quote mark searches work at all. Following the example above, the parentheses will find Jade Empire, but the quote marks will not. Again, it seems to search only the body text, not the title, when done in quote marks.

Just to follow up on the apostrophe thing, it seems a title search does not work on any term using an apostrophe, or at least an apostrophe followed by an s.

Yup confirmed.

The engine doesn't like apostrophe's...

Also, it seems, the need for brackets is mandatory. i.e. title:"the gentleman club" will not work as expected instead it should be title:[i]("the gentleman club"😉[/i]

About the inclusion time - the engine is updated 4 times a day IIRC. And it contains all 7 million+ posts.

Do you have a link to the thread and the search terms you used that didn't find the thread?

Well, it's about 4-5 threads that it doesn't find, and they're all on the front page of that specific forum, so it's not that big of a deal...but I noticed it when I was doing a search for all of the Matrix RPG threads in the RP forum. I'll type title:matrix into the search at the bottom of the forum, and it gives me all the old threads (which are 2-3 years old), but only one thread from this year (dated from June) comes up.

I've found the problem. One of the fields wasn't being tokenized properly.

I'm currently rebuilding the search index. Should be done in around 12 hours.