Curious about this sites search function
 

I can do a search for a topic on here and come up with nothing but when I do
a Google search on the same topic I come up with a number of hits on the
subject from this site?

What is the topic?

I've never come up with anything but complete garbage with the BF search function.

V-bulletin's search function has been brain-damaged forever. I assume that the stupidity is hardwired and unchangable, since I've been using V-bulletin forums since the early 2000s and all of them have been broken in exactly the same ways. The usual culprit is the "words too short or too common" filter, which breaks damned near every search that involves numbers or dimensions. The lack of boolean search, term grouping, and wildcards breaks the searches that the previous filters somehow managed to fail to break.

Google searches with the "site:" term aren't much better. But at least you can search for, say, "58 cm" and get results. Most of which will be useless, and you won't be able to tell that they're useless without clicking on them, because the two lines of text under the hyperlink will all be the same, but at least you'll have the illusion of success.

Every V-bulletin user and forum site owner/admin in the entire history of V-bulletin has hated the search function, for all of the same reasons. V-bulletin's developers have adamantly refused to change anything about it for just as long. There's a reason that most V-b sites I've been a member of have a FAQ line that says "Search sucks. Get over it." Indeed, so often have I seen exactly that wording that I suspect it's included in the default FAQ that gets generated when a V-bulletin site is built.

Bottom line...

You're screwed.

--Shannon

No reason to limit a search to BF. If you need to know something, just Google and get the info from wherever it turns up. Always a good policy prior to asking a question.:thumb:

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...if I really want to find something on here, from some previous posting I dimly recall, I do a Google search and use the limiting term "Bike Forums".

This has always worked pretty well for me, and while I don't want to indulge in harsh judgement of the V Bulletins search function, it is true they don't put nearly as much money and personnel salaries into maintaining it as Google does with theirs. Sometimes, you get what you pay for. :)

The site's search function doesn't work well in my experience. I use google instead, e.g.:

"[insert your query here] site:bikeforums.net"

Duckduckgo and bing use similar syntax AFAIK.

Thread moved from Bike Mechanics to User Assistance

This.

The regular search is useless.

The “advanced search” works fine.

Thank you. But I would say, it's the best method.

Folks that use click bait thread titles instead of using specific terminology are missing an opportunity to help future folks find information quickly and easily.

I would also use Advanced Search and narrow by forums. You can select multiple forums from the list by holding "Ctrl" and clicking on them.

A perfect example is I did an advanced search titles only for Dura Ace AX derailleurs. It came up with multiple pages of Dura ace derailleurs and 1 post
for ax derailleurs. When I google the term it brings multiple titles on the subject from bike forums.

There's a new search software we are testing on a few other sites before rolling it out on Bike Forums.