Forum Search Limitations

[TJackson]

Is there no way to search exact phrases of words under advanced searching? Or limit searches to titles or message texts? I'm finding the inability a severe limitation. Without those, I invariably find far too many hits to sift through. Maybe... talk to the Google people??

[SevenSpheres]

Or limit searches to titles or message texts?

This can be done on the advanced search page.

[TJackson]

Yes, I see an option for search Titles and Text only. Thanks. But I still see no way to differentiate searching "all terms" and "query as entered". That just brings back all terms and is inclusive of the phrase entered, as far as I can tell. I've tried double quotes. Still can't.

[TJackson]

Is there any way to search for an exact query? "all terms" and "query as entered" in advanced search appear to be inseparable. That just brings back all terms in the query and is inclusive of the phrase entered (which might be somewhere in a potentially large pile), as far as I can tell. I've tried double quotes. Still can't. A search for "draw lines" comes up with 127 entries, a few of which include "draw lines", all of which include "draw" and "lines". Shall I plow through them all?

[TJackson]

SevenSpheres, you appear to know your way around Celestia and these forums pretty well. Is your non-response as to the need for a "query as entered" and ONLY "query as entered" capability (non-incluse of "all query terms") an indication that you simply don't know if that is possible? Or asked a different way, have you ever been confronted with the dilemma in my previous post just above? Thx

[SevenSpheres]

Is there any way to search for an exact query? "all terms" and "query as entered" in advanced search appear to be inseparable. That just brings back all terms in the query and is inclusive of the phrase entered (which might be somewhere in a potentially large pile), as far as I can tell. I've tried double quotes. Still can't. A search for "draw lines" comes up with 127 entries, a few of which include "draw lines", all of which include "draw" and "lines". Shall I plow through them all?

SevenSpheres, you appear to know your way around Celestia and these forums pretty well. Is your non-response as to the need for a "query as entered" and ONLY "query as entered" capability (non-incluse of "all query terms") an indication that you simply don't know if that is possible? Or asked a different way, have you ever been confronted with the dilemma in my previous post just above? Thx

I don't think it's possible. Most likely the only way to make it possible would be an upgrade to the forum software; onetwothree is the person to talk to about that.

[ajtribick]

Based on experiences with several boards' search implementations, I generally find the most reliable option to be to use an external search engine, starting the query with "site:<URL>", e.g.

site:celestia.space "exact phrases of words"

Quick test, this seems to be somewhat more reliable on Google than DuckDuckGo.

[TJackson]

Tried this in the address field in Chrome:

http://www.google.com:celestia.space "draw lines"

Google just treated the whole thing as a search string. I contacted onetwothree about the issue. I'll see how that goes.

Added after 1 minute 28 seconds:
onetwothree responded with, "i have no idea. i don't know how phpbb works i only keep the server running."

[ajtribick]

Tried this in the address field in Chrome:

http://www.google.com:celestia.space "draw lines"

Don't know why you'd try that, I said "site:celestia.space", which is used in the query the link points to.

Here's what your query should be:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:celestia.space "draw lines"

This also works in the address bar in my browser, if I type

site:celestia.space "draw lines"

(in the above, "site" means the literal word "site", not "http://www.google.com")