# Searching for phrases



## Pit (Aug 13, 2006)

I don't know if this issue is related to the new server or not.

According to this thread, it should be possible to search for a phrase by enclosing the phrase in quotation marks. However, the search utility does not seem to work that way for me.

If I search for "one thread with that phrase" (including the quotes), I do not get the thread linked above (as Dave M suggests within the thread). Instead, I get ...

Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms. 

The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search : with, that

So, how do I, for example, search for "RCI points" without getting every thread that has "RCI" or "points" ? Am I doing it wrong?


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## Makai Guy (Aug 13, 2006)

No, I don't think this has to do with the server, it has to do with the vBulletin software we run, so I'll move this to a separate thread.

I get the same results you do, with quotes around the _one thread with that phrase_ phrase.  

If I don't put the quotes around the phrase, it does find the thread you mention, as well as several others that happen to have both the words 'phrase' and 'thread' in the same post (since 'one', 'with', and 'that' were thrown out from the search).

I thought maybe Dave had discovered something I didn't know about.

My GUESS is, if the search throws out words from your quoted phrase, it tries to look for what's left as an exact phrase.  In the case above, "one thread with that phrase" becomes "thread phrase", and apparently that phrase has not been used yet.  (It SHOULD find this one now that I've used it here, though, I'd guess.)

[Edit -- bad guess.  Doesn't find THIS thread, either.  I guess if it throws words out of your phrase it just doesn't work, period.]

If I do a search for "RCI Points" it does indeed find the appropriate threads (probably too many of them to do you much good, though - it maxes out at 200 returns and I'm sure that's not all of them).

The fact is, the search engine in vBulletin is not one of its strong points.


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## Pit (Aug 13, 2006)

After Googling vBulletin and searching, I came up with something interesting. If you look at this thread, there are some screen shots which show how to perform a boolean search using the Advanced Search page. However, the boolean search feature they show does not appear on the Advanced Search page here on TUG. Is this feature disabled?


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## Makai Guy (Aug 14, 2006)

Not so much disabled as not enabled.  vB in recent releases can be set to use mysql's database search capabilities rather than its own native search capabilities.  We have not enabled this because we lose our ability to define certain short words that we can force the search to include (currently RCI II VEP SFX DAE).


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## Pit (Aug 14, 2006)

Just my humble opinion here, but it doesn't seem worth giving up the boolean search capability in order to force those terms into the search.

At any rate, that feature was just something I came across when googling. Even using vB search capabilities, it seems like it ought to be possible to search for a phrase. Otherwise, it is really difficult to search for specific information without sifting through many unwanted threads.

edit: I went to another vB forum to try out the search capabilities, and I was able to perform a search phrase by enclosing the text in quotes. And they were apparently not using the mysql feature either.


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## Keitht (Aug 14, 2006)

I can understand the desire to make searching as simple as possible, but it also does need to be accurate to be  effective.  Using boolean expressions may not be obvious to many people, but it's not complicated either.  
It's not really any more complicated than the change in the way hyperlinks had to be inserted when the software changed.


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## Makai Guy (Aug 15, 2006)

I'd been having trouble getting my test forum up and running on the new server, but finally got it going today.

Will play around with the "full text search" option (i.e. using mysql's searching capabilities instead of vB's native search) and see how it goes.  If we decide to go with that here, it will require a shutdown to change over, but shouldn't be too long of one.


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