New Search

[onions]

i've implemented google search for the forums to offload hits to the database:

search.php

coincidentally, site search is handled by google as well.

good idea? bad idea?

unfortunately, searching a user's post history is still hitting our database. I may change that to a google search instead or remove it entirely.

any feedback is welcome.

[Joedward]

Is there anyway to make the search results looks nicer?

The google set up with FBTB colour scheme seems kinda.... off.

[onions]

unfortunately the google styling options are extremely limited. I can't change font, font size, spacing, or anything else. the only thing i have control over is the color palette.

[theJudeAbides]

Ace,

I'm not sure if this is the "old search" or the new one, but I find that the search bar above the topic list (next to "New Topic") doesn't really work the way I'd like it to. For example, if I'm in the MOC Showcase forum and want to find all UCS or [SW] posts and type "UCS" or "[SW]", I get the following message:

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: sw.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

I guess my question is, why can't I search on common tags used in topic posts? Wasn't that kind of the whole point of enforcing a tagging system to begin with? These lead to my next question: Would it be possible to make a search that searches topic Names and not the actual text of the topic? The problem with the current system is that, say I want to find an old MOC of the Imperial Shuttle, and do a search on "shuttle," the search results will return every post from every topic with the word shuttle. A more appropriate search, IMO, would only return one result per thread, with the option of only searching the topic titles. I'd imagine your SQL string (assuming you're using MySQL) would look something like:

Code: Select all

SELECT * FROM Topic WHERE title LIKE "%searchstring%" ORDER BY Startdate

You could then use PHP to read the results line by line and create links to each topic.

Anyways, that's just my 2 cents.