[OT] Searching an online forum

[Graeme]

Forgive me if this is utter rubbish. I use one particular online forum quite a lot, as do many others, and a great deal of useful information has been posted over a good few years. Finding it is the problem. Searching for a word is OK, but not a phrase. Not a motoring forum, but by way of example, if I search for morris minor, I can find every message containing morris OR minor, but not morris AND minor. The forum admin cannot help.

My thinking (this could be the rubbish part) is that the forum records are effectively a database, and it should therefore be possible to search for more than one word. I have tried (morris minor), (morris+minor), +morris +minor and various permutations, without any luck.

Might there be some magic trick that could work, or do forums not work like that? I would like to be able to search both thread titles and contents.

Thanks,

[Max Demian]

You could try Google site search, and then search for morris minor or "morris minor" and use any other of the Google methods. To do this, just include site: or site: in the Google search.

[Reentrant]

Is it a web-based forum? If so, just use Google and limit it to that site, and put the phrase in quotes eg

site:

"morris minor"

[Terry Casey]

Most, if not all, forums use commercial software and, given the forum owner's inability to help, I don't think its his own work!

Look at the bottom of a page, particularly the index page - you'll usually find something like "Another bulletin board from xyz" or similar.

If you can supply that information you stand a much better chance of getting a meaningful answer.

For example, it might be a standard feature that the forum owner has turned off by accident.

If you can't find any identification, ask the owner what package he is using.

[John Rumm]

The information may well indeed be contained in a database, however you don't have access to that directly, and are instead using the forum software to talk to it for you. Hence if the software does not support the query type you want, you may be out of luck.

However you may be able to get some of what you want using google. But note that this relies on the information you want being visible in a forum page that google is allowed to index.

If you start your search term with "site:url to forum" in front of your query.

Say for example, searching for:

"site:screwfix.com spanner" will yield only results from screwfix.com containing the word spanner.

"site:screwfix.com spanner+tap" will yield only results from screwfix.com containing spanner and tap.

All the other advanced search capabilities can then be used as well:

[alan_m]

I've found with many search engines putting both words between quotation marks works "morris minor"

[Graeme]

In message , John Rumm writes

Thank you John and all for the advice. The above is the stumbling block, as access to the forum is limited to signed in members (it is a club forum), so using the site: search does not work.

However, the site admin has been having another dig, and found what I was looking for. An 'exact phrase' setting, apparently. To recap, the original search morris minor would find either word. Now, it has to find both words, so will find, for example 'a minor problem with a morris'. Much better, but not perfect. Ah! I tried "morris minor" (with speech quotes) and that finds only the two words together. Perfect.

[Another Dave]

Have you tried "morris AND minor" without the quotes?

Another Dave

[Brian Gaff]

You are finding the reason or at least one of them why forums, or should that be forii? are so terrible. You cannot do text searches and every single one has a different keyboard shortcut set or functions. How on earth they can be better than Usenet makes me despair. Brian

[Peter Johnson]

You will probably finf that using AND, OR and NOT between words, in CAPITALS, without quotes, will work as well.

[Rob Morley]

The Latin plural of forum is fora.

[alan_m]

Many forums are policed to make sure that they stay on topic and are free of spam.

[Rob Morley]

Or to block contributions from people the moderators don't like, or opinions they find disagreeable.