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#1 2013-01-10 22:58:15

nedludd
Member
Registered: 2009-07-10
Posts: 9

Search issues

Am I doing something wrong or is search on this wiki practically unusable?

For example, try searching for "perl AND debug" with the default "Message text and topic subject" setting.  You get five pages of results, not one of them that I could tell relating to the search term directly.  You get topics about printers, and OpenOffice, and Python, and media players, but nothing useful on the searched items.

If you set "Search in" to "Topic subject only".  You get nothing.

I've seen this with many things I've search for, so it's not just this example.

Can I do anything different to make search more helpful?

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#2 2013-01-10 23:20:59

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,447
Website

Re: Search issues

I don't know if it's unusable, but I suspect it is mostly unused.

Most search engines allow you to specify site restrictions.  Both google and duckduckgo (I prefer the latter) can be given a search like "perl debug site:bbs.archlinux.org" and they should give you what you are looking for.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#3 2013-01-11 00:02:38

anonymous_user
Member
Registered: 2009-08-28
Posts: 3,059

Re: Search issues

I don't see the problem. You are searching for posts containing both the words "perl" and "debug". Perl is used for various things; what kind of results are you expecting?

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#4 2013-01-11 00:24:56

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: Search issues

nedludd wrote:

Am I doing something wrong or is search on this wiki practically unusable??

I think you mean on the forums - the wiki search has got its own issues, so it's not perfect either.

There is a chance that no threads with the words 'perl' and 'debug' exist. There's one with 'perl' and 'debugging'.

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#5 2013-01-11 00:28:10

anonymous_user
Member
Registered: 2009-08-28
Posts: 3,059

Re: Search issues

BTW, nedludd, you should know that in the context of forum searching, "Topic subject only" means it only searches the title.

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