Forum search, made easier?

I know a lot of you have complained about 'forum search' not working too well, and sometimes produced errors. The search function in the forums is integral to the software, and will be very hard for admins to improve IMO.
I've  mentioned using Google instead, but you need to type in quite a few terms to get it to just search the forum...

Since I use the search a lot myself, and have the same troubles, I decided to make a little custom Google search engine, that allows you to just search the forums or other TT sites and not any other sites, and allow you to use all the powerful search options that Google offers.

This seems to work quite well for me, so I've setup a little site for others to use as well, link below:

Table tennis search site

I've only put in the major forums and reviews sites so far, but can add any others on request.

If you try it, let me know if you find it useful or not. If people find it useful, I'll start adding other options/catagories as well. Any suggestions for ways of improvement/additions would be great as well...

Thanks Ritkuro, well worth considering!

varghesep: I though my post above answered this already?:

haggisv wrote: I've only put in the major forums and reviews sites so far, but can add any others on request.

It's only a quick website I put together, and if people are interested I'll add a lot more sites included in the search, and also more features. If there is no interest, I won't bother...

This is great! I hope you'll find the time to advance this project. Thanks..

haggisv wrote: Thanks Ritkuro, well worth considering! varghesep: I though my post above answered this already?: haggisv wrote: I've only put in the major forums and reviews sites so far, but can add any others on request. It's only a quick website I put together, and if people are interested I'll add a lot more sites included in the search, and also more features. If there is no interest, I won't bother...

This is kind of off topic but i felt it would be a good idea.

I think we should add a feature to when you are posting a new topic. Every new poster is scolded to use the search function because of double posting and my idea is this. Every time a new topic is made it is first put through a search to look for matches in the title and body paragraphs to avoid double posting. No more double posts or scolding

wawaicetea123 wrote: This is kind of off topic but i felt it would be a good idea. I think we should add a feature to when you are posting a new topic. Every new poster is scolded to use the search function because of double posting and my idea is this. Every time a new topic is made it is first put through a search to look for matches in the title and body paragraphs to avoid double posting. No more double posts or scolding

This is awesome! Great job haggisv!

OK, single site search now implemented.

Next:
- Add more forums & review sites
- include All TT sites search
- ???

Forum search is not working at all for me. Any complex (more than 2 words) query results in DB error. ;(

No, I mean the asp search page. Request cannot be processed. Timeout.

Probably you could optimize the SQL config file to allow more concurrent queries or larger timeout. I could help with some suggestions if this were MySQL but it obviously is not. Probably there are pros tah will help better with this issue. It is indeed very inconvenient to search Google for something that is on your board.

Biggest problem with the google search is that it also includes the signature info as well. So searching for equipment is almost impossible. You type in tenergy and you get tens of thousands of results because you get every post every person with tenergy in their signature has ever made.

how to use google search if I want to search only in Buy and Sell section for example?

zeio wrote: Use the "site:" operator in your search query For example, to look up "boll zlc" in the Buy and Sell section, use the following boll zlc site:http://mytabletennis.net/forum/forum_topics.asp?FID=16

thank you