The Search Engine is Hopeless

My title says it all!

Whether you use the “search for all terms” or “search for any terms”, I find the search engine next to useless at finding what I want. For example, I’ve been looking today for the thread on the Taipei Times, yet the search engine returns hundreds of pages just because they contain “Taipei”.

Is it possible it can be made smarter because I can’t be! :smiley:

Could Boolean search strings be added?

And then try searching for the just the word ‘times’ :noway:

Looking for “Times” alone will be just as unhelpful. The search engine doesn’t seem to return entries for more than one search term that conatin both as specified. Instead it finds all the pages with “Taipei” or “Times”, regardless.

Search for “Taipei Times” and this thread is at the top of the list: forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.ph … 899#160899

“Taipei Times” isn’t mentioned anywhere in this thread?

Sorry, That wasn’t a suggestion. What i meant was, the search seems to have a problem with the word ‘times’, try searching for it as an experiment.

If you set it to show results as ‘posts’ and to show ‘all available’ chars, you will see the word “times” is not in the posts.

it works with other words, “taipei cabbage” returns 4 results.

Usually it is best to “search for all terms” and “display results as posts” - neither of which is the default. I usually find what I’m looking for that way. Perhaps the default settings could be changed???

I searched for hope and got 2068 matches. So it definitely isn’t hopeless.

Once I had a little Google search thing on the page. I don’t know how it got there or where it went, but it searched a lot better.

I agree that the search function needs some improvement. In particular searches for terms (in " marks) should be supported and it would be nice if the result is displayed as post including formatting (like quotes etc.) and the search query highlighted (by means of a color or similar).