Celestia Forums

I know this may sound dumb, but I have not been able to figure out how to search the forum with a term that is two or more words. For example, I am seeking to locate posts that include "Star Trek". If I enter that in the search box, I get all posts that contain "Stars" or that contain "Trek". I want only posts that contain both words.

I've tried [Star Trek], +star +trek, {star trek}, Star+Trek .... nothing works.

Please ... what is the syntax for searching with a two word string.

Thanks

Frank

Frank,

I have been frustrated by this in the past. I think it's because the phpBB search function is just not very sophisticated. I think this is unlikely to change.

I find I get better results with a site specific google search. (using the google Advanced Search)
eg. http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22star+trek%22+warp+drive+site%3Ashatters.net&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

CC

Put both words in quotes like this "star trek". I think that will work.

Reiko:

Unfortunately, putting both words in quotes does not return search results with only both words included. Rather, you will get every post that includes "star", + every post that includes "Trek". That equals thousands of posts

Chuft-Captain, thanks so much for the tip. Searching the forum site only via Goggle does indeed return only hits that contain both words.

However. phbBB is a reasonable search engine. Surely, there has got to be a way within the forum itself to search for a two word string. This is elementary in any search query !!!

Anyone found the command string within phbBB that will do this?

Frank

fsgregs wrote:Reiko:

Unfortunately, putting both words in quotes does not return search results with only both words included. Rather, you will get every post that includes "star", + every post that includes "Trek". That equals thousands of posts

Chuft-Captain, thanks so much for the tip. Searching the forum site only via Goggle does indeed return only hits that contain both words.

However. phbBB is a reasonable search engine. Surely, there has got to be a way within the forum itself to search for a two word string. This is elementary in any search query !!!

Anyone found the command string within phbBB that will do this?

Frank

Frank,

just searched the forum using Reikos method and got the following result:

Search found 651 matches
Search term used: star trek ignored: star

It is still on huge side, but phpBB is intelligent enough to ignore star as it is used too often.
And you could then try to search within these results to find what you are looking for.

What would be real nice would be to make the results page only show the topic where the words were found and then on a click branch to all found posts within that thread. Would make things a lot easier, but we will have to wait for phpBB to have that perhaps integrated one day.

Regards,

Guckytos

Guckytos:

Thanks. You are right. The problem is that phbBB will ignore star, but will still not return only those results with both words in it.

For example, I was searching for the addon of "Deep Space 9", which is a model from the StarTrek series. When I typed "Deep Space 9", I got over 1000 hits of the word "Deep". phbBB ignored "star", and "9", but it still gave me a huge search result. What I wanted was only the posts with all 3 words in it.

Oh Well .....

Thanks for trying

Frank

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