Common words in searches

[James Hickman]

Hi

I'm increasingly having problems searching the forum for previous advice, because the search feature ignores words that are too common.

For example I wanted to see what oil others used in their primary chain case, and feel sure it must feature somewhere in the form. However I found it almost impossible to search for as the search engine rejected the words; chain, oil and primary saying "The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: chain oil primary.

I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done about this from your end or ours, but it is a shame, because there is a mine of fantastic information here and it is a shame to have to start a new thread. Any thoughts?

Best wishes and thanks for all the help so far!

[simon.holyfield]

No thoughts, other than to echo your frustration.

On the VMCC forum, the 'common word threshold' is set to 5. This means that words which are contained in more than 5% of all posts will be regarded as common and will be ignored in search queries, so it's saying that a search for a common word list will yield more than 5% of all posts - which obviously could be quite a few (there's 55000 posts on the AOMCC forum) and would leave you trawling through lots of stuff. Personally I'd rather have that situation and wade through them than not be allowed to look...

You can reduce the number or disable the function - I have no idea what the setting is on our forum. Webmaster John will know, and he may know of other reasons why it would be unwise to change it.

[alan.moore]

I use the Google search function in a web browser, so I would type

chain oil primary ariel :forum

hit enter and a list of the topics which match comes up. You can expand the list by clicking the 'more results' link at the bottom of the list

[simon.holyfield]

Good tip thanks Alan.

[admin]

5% is PHPBB board standard and what ours was set to.
I dropped it to zero and re-indexed the search

The phpbb forum search is not too hot anyway. many folks use google thus:

xxxxxx site:forum.arielownersmcc.com

(where xxxx represents the search criertia)

cheers

[dave.owen]

For the primary chain I use old engine oil.
Dave