People are always complaining about the search on this forum and I guess part of the reason is for advertising but this is how I search the forum and it appears to work pretty well, but apologies if this is already well known and obvious.
1. Go to your search engine of choice
2. Enter firstly what you want to look for but then on the end add 'https://singletrackmag.com'
NB: that is supposed to be a quote at the end not &# 8221!
EG: "Fairlight secan https://singletrackmag.co m"
Yep, always go to Google and add "single-track forum" to the search.
🙁
nixieFull Member
Adding ‘site:singletrackworld.com’ to your search term works better
And if you can't remember that, Google 'advanced Google search' will do the same
That used to work really well. It's gone a bit downhill since the most recent revamp. If you have enough keywords it should be ok but I think something went wrong with the time stamps on posts so you get quite a randomised order of responses.
The interesting thing (I appreciate the frustration of search in the forum) is that the current forum search IS Google.
typing site:singletrackworld.com suck eggs into Google is technically the same search as typing “suck eggs” into the forum search box. The current search is a Google tool called Custom Search. It’s free so long as we allow the first results to be sponsored results. Ie Google gets ad rev from it.
I hope people understand the technical challenge of creating a really useful search for the forum ourselves with over 10 million database entries. Any on site forum search needs to be able to find what you are looking for in milliseconds after going through every item of text within those 10 million posts.
That’s why we use Googles own pre indexed site search tool with all its issues. For example this thread doesn’t turn up in the results for “suck eggs” despite it being in the post title. Why? Because Google hasn’t yet added this thread to its massive index. We can request that Google crawls our webpages every hour or even every minute but that is only a request and Google does what it likes. Plus, crawling our forum every minute - every post that could possibly be updated with a reply - would put such a massive load on our server that the site performance would be even worse than it is.
This is all part of why we want to migrate to Wordpress VIP which has tools (Elastic Search) that will allow us to properly develop a fully functional search system. It’s very expensive for us to do this but it’s our plan if we can sort out the cost.
But I feel your frustration. I share it every day and we are doing our utmost best to find a way to make things better for everyone, not just full members.
I use the search box above and put keywords in quotation marks, works ok for me!
