Documentation add-on suggestion for Van2 Search

Andy K

Hey all, I reviewed this document: http://vanillaforums.org/docs/search ...but I'm still having issues.

Coming from a Van1 to Van2 migration. Van1 search was really solid, it resulted in really close match hits.

So, a user on my forum is specifically looking for something called "Dragon World". A search on those terms used to find hits (in comments). Now, such a search simply results in all keywords returning results. Any thread with the word "World" or "Dragon" in it return, and it doesn't seem possible to search directedly for "Dragon World".

Is there a better way? I tried adding "+" in front of the words

x00

well I searched for "Need help" on this forum and it returned results. It might be that is is goign to take a while for full text to get populated.

v1 used LIKE search which which uses more resources being less efficient, and generally isn't used on large sites You can use like search with v2 if you like.

UnderDog

Andy, I think the only way to improve those search results is to make your own plugin. I think the search results, by the way you explain it, are found by 'exploding' the search terms and then 'building' a search query using either 'like' or fulltext search. Applying the search wildcard '%' around both search terms.
Your plugin can look at how Vanilla 1 did it and then apply that to your plugin.

x00

you don't have to do that there is already a like search option.

Andy K

Ah, oops! Sorry guys, something strange happened.

I created the post above, then did some more testing, then rewrote the post.

However! There was a huge problem with creating a new post here. I don't know why, but when I added the single tag "search", it kept erroring out with "You can't have more than 5 tags", and when I deleted the tag it errored with something like "Tags can't be more than -360 characters long" (!!!) So I restored the post, but the post was apparently the PREVIOUS one I was building.

In short, I'm totally fine, figured it out, and this thread was supposed to be a suggestion for a documentation add. I'll repost what I originally intended to post here before all the posting errors.

Andy K

Ack, looks like my original post (that I had meant to post, and which was auto-saved) was wiped. Anyway, here's my solution, stupid simple, but not intuitive:

+"Dragon World"

That's it. Quote the string, THEN "+" it.

So my documentation suggestion was this, for @Todd

The documentation says: (a) you can improve your search by using the "+" symbol before your search keywords

My additional suggestion would be to make it more obvious how to search for strings:

===============

_**For example, if you want to search for the whole string "Thai Curry", and not just return individual results for discussions with "Thai" and discussions with "Curry", then put quotation marks around the query, and prefix it with a "+":

+"Thai Curry"**_

===============

In the interim, you might want to look into creating new discussions with tags. It was totally broken for me a few minutes back, leading to all this confusion! :-)

UnderDog

Andy can you add your search tips to the Vanilla Wiki please? thanks!