7 replies to this topic

[roscoe]

Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of this site is the lack of a functional search engine. Almost any search seems to return the message below (as you can see, "search" actually has more than 3 letters and is not an acronym). Now this is especially a problem for two reasons:

• the girls all seem to have nicknames that are between one and 4 characters ... god forbid you should search on (just for example) Ae
  
• newbies are likely to be flamed and told "use the search engine" by other BMs if they have failed to find previous posts on a subject

A truly charitable alteration (and what the heck, maybe even help the site) would be to give folks an embedded Bing or Google search (IMHO)

Discuss

Attached Images

• 

[Tomas]

Of all the ladyboy related forums on the net, this site has probably one of the best search functions.

[cheyenne]

I agree the search function works at times but is far from infallible and could be improved a lot

[Terry Tibbs]

Use the following to search the forum only from google...

site:www.ladyboyspattaya.com search term goes here

If we allowed searches of less that three letters the forum would be very broken.

[roscoe]

Terry Tibbs, on 14 September 2011 - 12:05 AM, said:

Use the following to search the forum only from google...

site:www.ladyboyspattaya.com search term goes here

If we allowed searches of less that three letters the forum would be very broken.

This is actually what I end up doing ... and I do agree that the search engine here is better than other sites, because it actually locates postings in threads (doing this yourself can be difficult in 50 to 100 page threads). But ... Google and Bing still do it better

[transgirls]

somehow the minimum length for a word seems to be 4 letters for the search, instead of 3.

and... the google search is not much of a help to search in the advanced forums.

as a webmaster myself, I can't comment much on Terry's post:

Quote

If we allowed searches of less that three letters the forum would be very broken.

because I don't use IPBoard, and don't the mechanics behind the search function.

But one thing I noticed is that on many Forums the search function is nearly useless nowadays.

The reason is probably found in what methods are used by the software to search within post texts.
It is a database performance issue.

But: I think there are some cheap modifications that could allow for a more useful search function.

For example, if you search for "om" you are really looking for " om " ( space * O * M * space ) - so that is a 4 letter word, but somehow the quotes get ignored, and the search turns up nothing... and we know there have been many posts by Titian about Om.

So, from a technical standpoint, I can't understand the difference between "beer" and " om " or "space-om-space" - both have 4 'letters' or 'characters'.
But the search engine seems to ignore the spaces I would like to make mandatory to consider " om " a 4 letter search expression.

So I think the engine could be improved regarding that matter, and include spaces as characters in phrase searches.

But I also think it is IPBoard's job to do it, because IPBoard is a paid product.
And the code is probably difficult to modify too.

[Terry Tibbs]

Forum Search Improvements!

[transgirls]

doesn't solve the problem for advanced forums, but it is a progress nevertheless!

Thank you Terry and LaaMok.