Search function question ;)

[,jACkdA\W]

Is there some syntax for searching for phrases? Sorry me almost always manages to get a proud total of 1000+ hits if i enter one, no matter what i tried so far.

[SmackuROM]

Another vote for this

As a first time user of this website, I had a similar experience. It was even more frustrating to find posts in my search where people had said that information was easily available by searching the forum. My experience did not reflect this sentiment.

[Underheaven]

from the phpBB manual,

If you select Search for any terms or use query as entered, then topic containing ANY of the words you entered will be displayed. You may use the AND, OR, and NOT operators to indicate which words you want to search for. Use AND to indicate that multiple words MUST be found. Use OR to indicate that a word is optional/alternate. Use NOT to indicate that a word should not be present in the topics displayed.

If you select Search for all terms, only topics containing all of the words in the query will be displayed. Selecting this option has effects comparable to using Search for any terms or use query as entered, with the AND operator between each term.

You may use the asterisk(*) wildcard character to broaden your search. The asterisk will match any number of characters. So *cheese* will match cheese, cheesewheel, wheelcheese, or wheelcheesewheel. Likewise cheese*fudge will match cheesefudge, cheeseyfudge, or cheese597fudge.

To increase the speed and decrease the overhead of the search utility, only words may be searched for. Phrases (such as "cheese wheel") may not be searched for, except by their component words. The minimum size for words is four characters, and the maximum size is twenty characters. Any non-alphanumeric character (e.g. white space and punctuation) is a word boundary.

Search for Author - You may search for posts by post author. Simply enter the author's username into this text field. You may use the asterisk(*) wildcard in author's names to broaden your search. Again, the asterisk will match any number of characters.

I agree, the searching I do here takes up more time than it should. Maybe there is a more useful syntax we all don't know of?

[Copytrooper]

There is a problem with the search function, but we're moving away from phpBB anyway, so we don't waste time with fixing that atm.