Search difficulties

[KopperBuck]

I'm having difficulty using the search function. The thread I'm looking for had to do with the wolves that were photographed by a member down by La Grande, OR, the photo was later published, the Eastern OR maybe?

I searched several combinations of wolf, wolves and different locations. I'm only getting one page of information, with none of the hits being the one I want.

Help - and thanks!

[bobcat]

Is it this one?  http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php/topic,69948.0.html

[Ray]

One issue with the search feature is that it has specific limitations. In that particular topic it doesn't have a lot of content in the first post. The content of the first post in a given topic and the title being relevant are important to topics being found by the search feature. Don't be afraid use the google search as well. Also if you are having problems with search it helps if you can provide an example of your search "wolves okanagan" or was it "wolves oregon" or was it "wolf sign", etc.

"wolf sign" produces that topic first wolf sign search results here

I always recommend starting your search here http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php?action=search as opposed to the search bar in the upper right. I think I'll see if Dale agrees with removing the search bar for technical reasons.

[KopperBuck]

Excellent, that was the post. Thank you.

For some reason it seems like everytime I search something I come back with real limited results. I try to be as generic as possible just to pull more info - but not all the time.

In this instance I search wolves la grande, wolves oregon, wolf oregon, wolf la grande

Thanks again for the help.

[Ray]

Always recommend starting your search from the Search Page. If you search wolves and you are viewing the bear hunting board it will look only in that board. It's hard to see where it might have gone wrong unless all steps which were taken are known. But your best bet is from the search page not the search bar. I don't know if I can stress that enough because the bar is scoped to what you are seeing. If you are vieiwing one topic and it is about moose and you do a search for wolves it likely will not return any results unless there is talk about wolves in the moose topic as well. I hope that was confusing for you as it was for me.

Wolves la grande - no results

[KopperBuck]

Here's another - there was a recent post about elk that were supposed to be south of Pendleton.

http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php/topic,71779.0.html

I searched elk pendleton, came up with zero results. Even when I searched the topic title only.

This is the type that I'm generally confused on. I search topics I know should hit a lot, and don't, or seem obvious anyways.

Thanks for the tip on Google, I guess I'll be giving that a shot from now on, as well.

[bobcat]

I searched for "wolf" and also did it by user name, so I put "hogsniper" in the box that says "by user"

[Ray]

Here's another - there was a recent post about elk that were supposed to be south of Pendleton.

http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php/topic,71779.0.html

I searched elk pendleton, came up with zero results. Even when I searched the topic title only.

This is the type that I'm generally confused on. I search topics I know should hit a lot, and don't, or seem obvious anyways.

Thanks for the tip on Google, I guess I'll be giving that a shot from now on, as well.

put quotes around it when there are multiple words and it appears for elk pendeleton results


Elk pendleton is not the same as "Elk pendleton"

[KopperBuck]

I generally search all forums, just for the sake of frequency. I don't want to miss any posts.

Funny you mention the search bar, I did figure that out quite some time ago.

So how come in the first post "wolves" and "Oregon" are both present but it still didn't kick it out? Just because?? Just trying to be as efficient as possible with it, there really are a lot of resources out there.

[bobcat]

I just tried it again without also searching by user, and it still worked but I got a lot more results. In this case, it's best if you select "show recent topics first" in the "search order" box. Otherwise it uses the default which is "most relevant results first." To me it's usually much easier to find what I want out of the list of results when they're in order by date.

[KopperBuck]

put quotes around it when there are multiple words and it appears for elk pendeleton results


Elk pendleton is not the same as "Elk pendleton"

Now that's funny, guess I need to be ready for their misspellings as well. What does the quote action do? Room for error?

[Ray]

I generally search all forums, just for the sake of frequency. I don't want to miss any posts.

Funny you mention the search bar, I did figure that out quite some time ago.

So how come in the first post "wolves" and "Oregon" are both present but it still didn't kick it out? Just because?? Just trying to be as efficient as possible with it, there really are a lot of resources out there.

Oregon is not the subject of the topic so it must get buried by the search algorithm. Search is not the greatest feature of SMF version 1.

[Ray]

put quotes around it when there are multiple words and it appears for elk pendeleton results


Elk pendleton is not the same as "Elk pendleton"

Now that's funny, guess I need to be ready for their misspellings as well. What does the quote action do? Room for error?

Matches a phrase.

http://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php?action=help;page=searching

While you can just type (and search for) any combination of characters, you should consider using quotes to make your search really work for you:

Quote Marks
To put this in a nutshell, searching for simple machines forum will return any or all of these three words, but enclosing the search string in double quote marks (ie "simple machines forum") will return only the entire phrase.

[bobcat]

Just to be clear when I did the search for "wolf" I did not have it in quotes. That would only be for multiple words when you only want to look for instances where they are found together in that order.

[Ray]

You can wildcard results to get room for error or search from results which may have spelling errors.


Results for pedelt*

results for pend*

results for wolves pend*