Search engine

Don Case

Don Case

Joined
Jul 10, 2021
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Location
Vancouver Island
I just tried a search for "Fixed Blocks". I had just posted a question about fixed blocks and my post popped right up on top but all the suggested posts after that didn't seem to even mention fixed blocks. I didn't read the entire threads but I did take a close look around the area that it took me to. Is there something I'm not understanding about the way this works? It's not just the "fixed block" thing, I've noticed this before that I do a search for something and none of the suggested threads have anything to do with the search parameters. What am I doing wrong?
 
It looks like it's the whole thread. Also even if you put quotes around "fixed blocks" it still show individual terms.
 
I have found that the search will show anything that has any one of the search words in in and, sometimes, I see results that have a part of the search word, or that the search word is a part of a bigger word. The WWW show how many hits it found and I have seen millions of responses stated in the result in only a few seconds. Too bad that this wonderful wool is amazingly miss-applied too many times. I once tried writing a more extensive search message, only to get EXTENSIVELY more useless responses. Just keep it simple and as accurately stated as you can.
Happy modeling.
Steven
 
I understand your point. The search engine on SOS is a very simple "word for word" engine and probably has a very simple algorithm. So, f.e. it will only return threads, post, etc that has those two words in it "fixed and "blocks" as you have found out and only if the words "fixed blocks" was used as an aggregate (combined together) were used in a thread or post, THEN it would have returned the sentence that has those two words combined. Unfortunately for you (and others), it only returned threads and posts that had EITHER the word "blocks" or "fixed".
Google has a much higher and stronger search engine that can conceptualize and use topical expressions to give you thousands of returns. With google you can even do an "image" search and "video search" on the aggregate "fixed blocks" and again it will return hundreds of videos and images. Unfortunately, SOS just does not have that powerful of an engine - as it only will return a literal meaning. Another reason why the SOS search is limited as it is a "closed system". It is only searching "inside" the forum for words only - it does NOT go outside on the internet searching - maybe of which you might have expected.
 
Thanks Donnie. I wasn't expecting it to search outside of the forum but I did think it would be a little more complex than a basic "find" function. Now I know. I've found that most, if not all, forums are like this. It does seem weird that you can get better results using Google. I'll deal with it.
 
You're good - I am like you, yes, the search engine here is quite lacking - really nothing I can do about this as this is built into the forum software. Even if I were to do a third-party add-on, it might still produce the same results - BUT, now that I am thinking about it, that also makes me think that I do have a developer that I have contact with and see if he has anything that would seem to work better. I can put this on my list of things to research - no worries as this is why I am here.
 
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