Improving search outcomes?

[expat]

Don't know if you can improve this, but here's an example that frustrated me today.

Wanted to find the thread where Bulldog mentioned he had an oil analysis done by Blackstone Lab.s.

Here's the search words I used...

Oil Analysis
Oil Test
Oil Quality

None of these found any relevant searches at all.

Eventually I searched the maintainence section manually to find a reference to oil analysis and low behold IN THE TITLE and IN THE FIRST SENTENCE were the words "oil analysis" :pissed1:

Any way of amping up the search feature? Is my initial failure due to a setting I need to change eg search period? Should I use the Advance Feature instead?

EDIT: just tried using Advanced Search and leaving the options as broad as possible (hoping to gets lots of hits) and got nada again.

[bulldog]

Usign phrases in search engines are always tricky. Normally it is better to use a single word for a search, in this case analysis would be best.

Words of shorter than 4 letters are a real problem, as you normally have to add a * at the end, but then it can turn up all sorts of interesting results. We have set the minimum word order to 3, but it still has some mixed results.

If you know who posted the thread or post it is better to use advanced search and then put the screenename in. Then just use a single keyword for the search.

Phrases is a problem for the forum software, but even Google battles with it a lot of the time.

In this case try bulldog and analysis; and it comes up with the threads in question.

I think in your case the 3 letter word and the phrase just threw off the engine. CUrrently not much we can do about it. We will probably upgrade the software in the near future, which will hopefully improve the search funtion a bit. However this remains to be seen as I have had the same issue on other forums with later versions of the software. In the mean time watch the short words and phrases for better search results.