Search Function is not Working Well

[Jim Koepke]

Maybe the best way to get my meaning across is with a picture:

Search Discrepancy?.png

If > "Knife lines can be difficult to see even with good lighting." < is searched on SMC through Google, nothing comes up. If it is used in Google without the SMC filter it shows the post of my interest.

The SMC search feature used to work very well, what happened?

jtk

[Jim Koepke]

My hope was someone could enlighten us users as to why this happens or if anything can be done to change it to make the SMC search function work like it did a few years ago. The same searches for old posts used to find them with ease. Now it seems very difficult to find anything with the SMC search. Often the results list a lot of things that aren't even on SMC.

Is there an explanation or is it an internet mystery?

jtk

[Keith Outten]

The search feature you have used in the past was a custom search routine programed by our server administrator Aaron Koehl and it was fantastic. Unfortunately an upgrade from vBulletin destroyed Aaron's search routine because they made major changes to the program code. Since that time vBulletin has continued to make changes with almost every upgrade that make it financially impossible to revise the custom search program or any other improvement that Aaron has made along the way.

This is just one of the reasons we want to convert to Xenforo. Using the Google search option is still the best way to search our archives which is unfortunate BUT we will eventually resolve this problem when we leave vBulletin. Aaron has made the majority of the corrections necessary to convert The Creek to Xenforo but he has not had the time to finish the job. His schedule has been saturated for the last year with minimal time to just do the most critical work here to keep us online.

[roger wiegand]

I see the identical results searching on Google with or without the site limitation, however, I realized I designated the site differently. site:sawmillcreek.org returns the threads with that phrase, site:www.sawmillcreek.org does not. This looks to be a Google oddity, not really anything to do with vBulletin.

[John K Jordan]

This works in Google: site:sawmillcreek.org "Knife lines can be difficult to see"

(EDIT: oops, I see Roger already posted the same thing)

JKJ

[Paul F Franklin]

I have noticed that I usually get better results if I use the "advanced search" option and then just enter whatever phrase I was going to search on anyway. For whatever reason, this seems to eliminate all the non-SMC results without having to enter the site spec. I've started subscribing to any threads I think I might want to revisit in the future just to make them easier to find.

[Jim Koepke]

I see the identical results searching on Google with or without the site limitation, however, I realized I designated the site differently. site:sawmillcreek.org returns the threads with that phrase, site:www.sawmillcreek.org does not. This looks to be a Google oddity, not really anything to do with vBulletin.

Thanks Roger and John, next time this will be given a try.

jtk