Tip: Even better searching of ScubaBoard

[Temple of Doom]

Hi all,

I've been poking around on here for months and months searching and reading hundreds of threads. One thing I noticed is that the vBulletin forum engine doesn't have the best searching capabilities.

For example, so often I would want to search for a TLA (three letter acronym), or product ID that was three letters or less (like "CD4"), but the search ignores words that are less then 4 letters.

This is understandable, the forum engine is great at what it does, it's not made to compete with google.

Fortunately I've got a very handy tip that will give you all the power of google for searching SB.

If you enter the following in to google search, it will find all instances of CD4, something the forum search cannot do:

site:scubaboard.com CD4

Simply add the site:scubaboard.com into your google query and you can do all the advanced searching techniques that google allows, just for searching on SB.

Say you want to find all posts that mention wetsuits and peeing, but do not mention sharks:

site:scubaboard.com wetsuit pee -shark

Bob's your uncle.

There are limitations to this, notably google can be a couple days behind in its caching of the board, but hopefully that's of use to some of you.

Craig

 

[miketsp]

very neat tip

 

[Scubapat]

thanks for the handy info!

 

[vladimir]

If you'd done a search, you would have seen that this has been covered before:

http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?t=138506&highlight=google+search+scubaboard

 

[El Orans]

The FAQ would also have yielded an answer: Can I search the forum?

 

[diversteve]

Just bracket the TLA in asterisks - i.e. *CD4* should return all results for CD4.

 

[ThatsSomeBadHatHarry]

Temple of Doom, you got served.

If you'd done a search, you would have seen that this has been covered before:

http://www.scubaboard.com/showthread.php?t=138506&highlight=google+search+scubaboard

that is a cool tip though.

 

[WarrenZ]

Guess everyone is a critic lets just chalk this one up in the "Well Duh" column<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>