Add Google Searches

[agmorgan]

The forum search ignores certain keywords for one reason or another.
This causes a problem if you have a valid reason for searching for a 'common' word.
e.g. info on the immediate window is hard to find as 'immediate' is a 'common' word and is excluded from the search.
You can get around this by searching on Google like this
immediate window site:www.vbforums.com "Classic Visual Basic"

Can this be implemented somewhere on the site?
You could have a text box with a drop down next to it containing all the sub-forum names to allow the search to filter by sub-forum.

[brad jones]

interesting. Immediate should not be considered a common word, so I'm not sure why it is showing up as one. Common words tend to be those in the list shown at http://www.ilsp.gr/search_igwords_eng.htm - words like 'the', 'an', 'should', 'never', etc.

We'll need to have Joe look to see why 'immediate' is being ignored.

Brad!

[MartinLiss]

...You could have a text box with a drop down next to it containing all the sub-forum names to allow the search to filter by sub-forum.

Are you aware of Search|Advanced Search?

[agmorgan]

What I was getting at was perhaps adding something to a page (probably the advanced search page) to send a search request to Google.

The Advanced search does let you chose the sub-forums, but it doesn't let you search for common words (e.g. 'immediate window')

The purpose of the drop down I was suggesting would add the name of the forum (in quotes) to the google search (which would also always include site:www.vbforums.com).

I suppose you wouldn't need a dropdown if the google search was added to the Advanced search page as you could use the data from the sub-forum selection box that is already there.

[MartinLiss]

immed*ate will find "immediate" and immediate*window will find "immediate window".

[brad jones]

The suggestion of using Google search is a valid, good suggestion. Right now the forums use their own built-in search (which should find immediate, but isn't on this site...).

We actually license and use Google search on many of our other sites, so we have considered this. For now, the forum search should work for searching -- The 'immediate' results seem to be a fluke.

Brad

[MartinLiss]

It would be really nice to have a robust search capability like the one that Google would provide.

[brad jones]

The vBulletin program indexes every word posted into the forum (except for common words). It is hard to do much more than that.....

Brad!

[MartinLiss]

The vBulletin program indexes every word posted into the forum (except for common words). It is hard to do much more than that.....

Brad!

Indexing is the easy first step. Adding search capability is harder. I'd like to be able to use this (at least the 1st four things) in vbforums.