The Search feature

Is the search feature broken or am I just using it wrong?

I have put in names of threads which I know exist and it tells me there are no matches. This has happened a few times now. Which seems odd to me.

If there was a problem with it it might explain all the newbies creating threads about things that already have threads.

But if I'm using it wrong please someone explain it to me

It works for me, but I haven't used it tonight. May I ask what exactly you're searching for?

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OK, I glanced at the main page, and remembered that Holden has done the film festival threads for more than 2-3 years. I searched the word Portland, and it gave me these thread options . . .

2010 Portland International Film Festival
2009 Portland International Film Festival
Portland International Film Festival 2007

I feel "pretty" sure that there are more than three film festival threads. If so, then maybe the search function only goes back for three years. If you are searching for threads that are older than that, then maybe that is the problem. It will judge this by the latest post in the thread. As far as these three threads go, 03-06-2007 is the oldest post date. One thing is for sure, the search function is working properly. My guess is that there is a three year time limit set up, but I could be wrong. Then again, maybe there are only 3 years of film festival threads made. Holden? Holden? Anyone?

At least we know it works!

I've had a few probs with it, but not sure if it's due to Mofo being a bigger beast these days or what. Tried searching for "They Live by Night" and got nada [searching 'entire posts' yada yada] - even tho i know I'd written a review up in the tab. Found mine in the end by searching for Night alone in the tab, but still no idea if there are other write ups of it floating around.

Just tried it again for the Games and Tabs forum as a whole, and it's returning things like Saturday Night Live (& people just saying 'Night'). I'm sure quote marks used to do the trick in the past. It does seem to be acting a bit odd.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

The first couple years I didn't make separate threads, I just listed the movies in the 'what was the last movie you saw in the theater?' thread.

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Yeah, I've noticed an increase in issues with it. It's probably a but unwiedly. I can (and will) rebuild the search index, but it's intensive and I'll probably have to stay up late and try to do it at a time where it won't impact people too badly, but it's on the to-do list, and will probably happen sooner rather than later.

In the meantime I just tend to use slightly vaguer search terms, fiddle with the Advanced Search a bit, and if it's still no good and I'm sure something's there, I'll resort to Google (you can search this site specifically by tacking "site:movieforums.com" onto the end of your search).

Thanks for reporting this, though. Hopefully the rebuild will help.

Recently I have tried 'Mighty Boosh' and 'Concert tab' which are two threads in the television and music forum and it couldn't find any matches. It's not all threads in the television and music forum, though, and I know there were a few others in other sections of the site but I'm afraid I can't remember what those were.

It doesn't help that a lot of films decide to use common words for their titles (Up, Let the Right One In etc.) but that's a different issue...

The search in the lists area doesn't work for me. Every time I type in a film and hit enter, nothing happens. I mean, literally nothing happens, like maybe a part of the search function is missing from that area or something. Just an FYI Yoder.

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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...

The only way it'll search properly is if you hit the search button on the screen, it doesn't if you use the enter/return key on your keyboard.

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

So it does. Thank you Mr. Lime.

When I search for Concert Tab, I get nothing. When I search for Tab, I get these . . .

Movie Tab II
The Video games Tab
Television Tab
Reading Tab
Food Tab
Where you've been tab
tab
Fashion Tab
The Naked MoFos Tab
The Movie Trade-off Tab
Video-Game Tab III
The Ups and Downs of Your Day Tab
CD Tab
The Utterly Disturbing Advertisement Tab
Comics tab
TV Tab
The Picture Tab
Fight Club: The Tab
Movie Tab
Fortune Cookie Tab
Lunch Tab
The Contests Tab
The "uncomfortable situation" tab
The Sports/Exercises Tab
The Christmas Present Tab

When I search for Concert, I get it . . .

Concert Tab. The last post was made on 10-26-2009.

As far as the Mighty Boosh goes, I only received three threads for the word Mighty. I got nothing when I used Boosh, alone or with Mighty.

Thanks! Now that you've posted that, I do believe I've asked you that before. I think maybe when the profile comments got going. I'll need to see.

It obviously does have problems, and you are not alone, but I'm still curious whether or not there is a 3 year limit, or any kind of limit set on these? I know there is, concerning our IP search setup. There is also a 2,000 post limit on what we can see from our own posts. That's why I assume there is one here, as well. I wish we could see all of our posts by searching, instead of the last 2,000 posts made.

Unfortunately that can really bog things down; I think we lowered it again recently, though if and when the system works properly, it should still help us find individual posts; just not in a list of all our posts, since for many of us that'd eat up a ton of resources.

No year limit, though. I've found some pretty ancient threads!

Anyway, I'll post updates here about when I might be rebuilding the index, and we can see if that helps at all. If the problem persists, I might integrate a built-in Google-based option as a second option.

Thanks for all your work Chris

Okay, some good news: after one partial-rebuild a few days ago, the search index was rebuilt completely last night. In theory this shouldn't have made a huge difference, but I suspect that, over time, there've been some scattered data issues that might have been causing problems like this.

Anyway, I tried pretty much all of the example searches in this thread ("They Live By Night", "Mighty Boosh", "Concert Tab", etc.) and they all seem to work now, so this may have done the trick. If you guys could give some of them another go to verify, I'd appreciate it.

Yes, try these for him. Dude stayed up all night to fix this. It was pert near eight before he left here.

It does seem to be better in some areas . "Dean Spanley" drew a blank before, but now produces the right posts.

I'm still getting the same spread of 'night' results for "They Live by Night" tho. (It defines the search as the following on the results page: Keyword(s): "They OR Live OR Night"). Alternatively the same search can also produce this:

Similar for "Big Nothing". It churns out a list of 'nothing' posts.

I'm searching 'entire posts' & asking for it to display as posts etc.

I forget exactly how some of the the boolean mechanics work; are you using quotes anywhere?

Anyway, I get tons of replies when I, on the Advanced Search page, simply search for "They Live by Night" (sans quotes). Entering your username on the right should narrow it down to just the posts in this thread and the one you're looking for.

Let me know if that works, and/or if I'm misunderstanding something. I can't duplicate the "OR" stuff, so it'd be helpful if I could figure out what leads to it.

It does seem to be working better now. Thanks for looking into this, I thought I was just going mad

Ah yep, that works. I was using quotes previously, and not looking just for my review per se. (I seem to remember that being a pretty reliable approach before ~ useful if you want to find all mini-reviews on the site etc )

With quotes (& no poster specified) you get the two responses (big list or nothing found).

Cheers for overhauling tho btw. Is one of the many natty features on the site

Ok, new problem I'm having with searching - searching for movies with really common words in their names. I wanted to see if there were any discussion threads for Let the Right One In. Duly typed the title into the search box only to be told that there were no results and that the following words were not included in the search 'let, the, right, one, in'. Great . I seem to recall having the same problem with Up. Is there a magic way to bypass this when searching, or do we need to start lobbying movie studios to include at least one really weird word in all their titles (Inception there's no problems finding, of course...)