A funny fact about this forum. You will be laughing really h

[omer]

Okay, here's the thing: I have been lookin for people to rent an RV together in this forum. So I typed "looking" on the search bar.

Guess what happened next? Nothing showed up. NOTHING! I was in shock. How come nobody used the word "looking" in their sentence? Then, I typed "lookin" accidentally. Hundreds of results came down.

What a coincidence right?

[Elderberry]

Guess what? I typed "looking" into the search bar just now and still nothing shows up. And I know that word should be in there because you just typed it. Funny, no? Are you laughing yet?

Search on this site sucks.

But, if you go to Google and type: "looking for rv to share eplaya" (without the quotes), you'll get a bunch of results. (Or you could also type: looking for rv share site:eplaya.burningman.org" again without quotes.)

Welcome to eplaya.

[Just_Joe]

Stop word.

“Words that do not appear in the index in a particular database because they are either insignificant (i.e., articles, prepositions) or so common that the results would be higher than the system can handle (as in the case of IUCAT where terms such as United States or Department are stop words in keyword searching.) Stop words vary from system to system. Also, some systems will merely ignore stop words where use of stop words in other systems will result in retrieving zero hits. ”

http://www.iusb.edu/~libg/instruction/h ... lean.shtml

[Eric]

Just_Joe is probably dead on.

Cut and paste the search below, with quotes, into google:
site:eplaya.burningman.org "RV" AND "share"

That got me 11,400 hits just on ePlaya (the site: parameter means it will only look on the site you list)

Part of Google-fu is knowing how to work with it's limitations

[Ratty]

Thanks Just Joe. I've often wondered about that. So kids what did you learn today at school? ''Stop Word".

[omer]

Eric haha so it all comes down to the martial art of Google-fu... Good technique though

[trilobyte]

Sorry, I didn't see this as it was posted in Open Discussion and not in ePlaya Feedback. I gave it a nudge to the right board, as that's a better fit for a discussion about operation of the site.

Joe's closest to hitting the nail on the head. The site's mysql search functionality works really well, but doesn't index various common words. Elderberry's right in that if you want to go the dumb search route (that is, not search by keywords and just type random words that come into your head), using something like google or bing with those words plus 'eplaya' will get you the best results (all the major search engines index our site). Eric is right in that if you're smart and search by keywords, you get better results (the same is true on just about every search engine).

You can also get better results when searching on ePlaya sometimes by clicking on the advanced search button and narrowing the focus. You can specify that you're looking for words in topic titles or in topics and messages, or for stuff posted by a specific person (great for trying to find an old conversation, if you've been on the site for a while), or you can choose just a specific board or boards to look in.

All searching aside, you can expect to see posts about RV shares for the 2016 event on the aptly titled "Rideshares and Resource Sharing" board. There's very little in there now, because it's still really early in the season. Good luck in finding a connection.

[Skuzzy61]

To get MySQL to catch the common words, change the length of the ft_min_word_len from the default of 4 to 3. You will need to rebuild the index, but that should catch a lot more.

Just a thought.

[trilobyte]

Sorry, we're not doing that.

[Skuzzy61]

Sorry, we're not doing that.

Oh, I worded that poorly. It was not meant to be a directive. It was meant to be informative. My bad for the poor choice of wording.

[trilobyte]

No worries at all, I took it as a request... it's just something we aren't going to be doing anytime soon. Doing things like including common words and reducing the minimum number of characters beyond those minimums has a fairly high performance cost. The current setup offers a performance sweet spot and provides great results to those who use it for strategic keywords, and those who would prefer a more google-esque or bing-tastic experience can get best results by simply using those search engines with the keyword 'eplaya' tacked on.

[Skuzzy61]

Oh, I know. And yes, I know you took it as a request, which is what I did not intend at all.

Sometimes you do things for so long it becomes second nature and you just flat out forget how to parse out that information in an informative way, rather than a declarative manner.

Yes, there are performance ramifications. It was never meant to be a request, but thank you for not taking a hammer to my temple.

[Just_Joe]

Joe's closest to hitting the nail on the head.

I win!
Drinks all around, but don't go nudging this to the bar thread, Trilo.