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Midas
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#1 Post by Midas »

Search term used: net tool ignored: net
Forum search fails even if I enclose the search string in quotes. Is there a way to overcome this limitation? Better yet, are there any syntax options to avoid having to go to "advanced search"?
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webfork
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Re: Forum search

#2 Post by webfork »

Midas wrote:
Search term used: net tool ignored: net
Forum search fails even if I enclose the search string in quotes. Is there a way to overcome this limitation? Better yet, are there any syntax options to avoid having to go to "advanced search"?
In my experience, although Google and Bing return results, they have the same problem: it's so generic it just gets lost in a sea of results. It was a dumb idea for Microsoft to name it that in the first place and it's why I always call it "dotNET" whenever the topic comes up.
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Midas
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Re: Forum search

#3 Post by Midas »

Thanks for chiming in. :)

I was alluding to a more general problem -- the fact that there's no way of circumventing the stopword search null result. On Google you can enclose in quotes for performing a string search, but that doesn't work here...
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webfork
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Re: Forum search

#4 Post by webfork »

Midas wrote:I was alluding to a more general problem -- the fact that there's no way of circumventing the stopword search null result. On Google you can enclose in quotes for performing a string search, but that doesn't work here...
Oh yeah that makes more sense. I evidently won't let a the obvious intention of a thread post get in the way of me going on about Microsoft naming conventions. :)
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Andrew Lee
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Re: Forum search

#5 Post by Andrew Lee »

I am afraid you'd have to use Google directly for this:

Code: Select all

net tool site:portablefreeware.com/forums/
There are known limitations for MySQL full-text index (database search) and phpBB search (forum search). Google didn't invest billions in their search engine for nothing. :D
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Midas
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Re: Forum search

#6 Post by Midas »

webfork wrote:I evidently won't let a the obvious intention of a thread post get in the way of me going on about Microsoft naming conventions. :)
Be my guest (anytime)... :)

Mr. Lee search expression will do the work nicely; but, and I don't want to make myself a nuisance with this, text search theory was already quite mature before Google was started; we had QUIK and QUOK and bolean and proximity operators when working in the ancient online databases of the 70s, like DIALOG -- not to mention ARCHIE and GOPHER... :shock:

EDIT:

In a further example, it's impossible to search for 'click.to' (http://www.clicktoapp.com/)...
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