Updated Search Feature

[SolitonMan]

Hello, I'm wondering if it would be possible to get an updated search feature for the site. It's very frustrating to try to look for specific items only to have the search either fail or bring back so many results as to be useless.

Specifically I'd like to be able to do a phrase search. For example, just before making this post I did a search for "On the Edge". Just like that, with double quotes and all. What happened was that "On" and "the" were ignored, and a search was conducted for "Edge".

With a slight bit of code modification, the search feature could have performed the search I wanted to make. I do PHP programming for a living, if you'd like some help to make this happen I could find the time. I'm happy to put out some effort if it gets me what I want.

Thanks for taking a look at this, I hope it's not too much of a bother to consider this request.

 

[Noumenon]

Good request, nicely phrased. As a workaround while you're waiting, I created a Firefox keyword search so I can type

en "on the edge"

into my address bar and get these results.

I did it by right-clicking the Google search box, "Add a keyword search," giving it the keyword "en", and then pasting the following into the "Location" box:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aenworld.org+%s&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a]site:enworld.org %s - Google Search

It works really well, I've found hundreds of old threads this way trying to figure out how spells work.

 

[Morrus]

We use stock software (in this case vBulletin 3), so rewriting the software is a pretty major endeavour unless there's an existing, tested hack out there which can do it.

That said, since we're working behind the scenes on the upgrade to vBulletin 4, spending time on this old code base would be wasted since it would only be used for a short while. I'm not sure how good the vBulletin 4 search feature is; hopefully it'll suit your needs a bit better.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Google will search this site exclusively if you type "site:enworld.org" into its search box before your search terms.

Example: site:enworld.org halfling paladin

 

[Noumenon]

Yeah, my post was about how to automate that so you can type "en search terms" in the address bar instead of having to type out the "site:enworld.org" stuff. I'm addicted to short searches, I have "gi" to search Google Images, "pf" for the pathfinder SRD, "bg" for Bible verses, "w" for wikipedia, "scg" for Magic cards, "u" for Youtube, and about fifteen others.