I think a lot of the same questions you see day after day could be cut down if the search function was a little more flexible and allowed better filtering by forum, date, title, description.
Just my 2 cents.
sem4u
4:45 pm on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)
I agree MrSpeed. Until then I use Google and type 'webmasterworld x-problem-x' to find what I need.
sun818
5:15 pm on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)
Hi, if you want to search by forum you can enter /forumXX as a search term. Works great...
Yidaki
7:35 pm on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)
sem4u, yah you hit the nail! Google is the best WebmasterWorld site search ... sorry brett. ;) I'm really amazed when i search google for something that i don't even think to be possible WebmasterWorld content and find a (most of the times) valuable discussion of WebmasterWorld.
eaden
11:51 am on Apr 15, 2003 (gmt 0)
I would reccomend swish-e [swish-e.com], it's a GPL search engine, and I use it on my site to great effect. The idea is that it doesn't need to crawl your site to index it. You make a simple script that dumps the database as a series of html pages ( all in one file that is piped to the program) with meta tags such as <meta name="forum" description="Foo"> <meta name="poster" description="jbloggs"> etc. This lets you search selectivly on any of those meta tags, as well as returning the tags in your results formatted as you see fit. For example you could have a reply count next to the results. It is fast - it stores it's database in binary format, and also fast at indexing - on my forum with 8000 posts, it can index as fast as the database can dump itself :) The only downside is it doesn't return a "quote" from the page in question aka google.