I never find anything useful in Search

[brooks]

I've tried repeatedly to look things up so I won't be asking a question that has long hair on it from being so old - but I can never find anything. Yet this message board is very popular and has a lot of people answering every kind of question - so I must be using the Search wrong.

How would I get meaningful results for a question like, "What are some good choices of HVLP conversion gun if I only have a small compressor?"

I get either no results or a zillion results so that I end up having to read the whole history of the board. I'd like more useful results.

[bigsteel15]

Use advanced search and in your case, search for HVLP in Tool Talk only.
BTW, if you have a small compressor, I don't know that there is a gun for you, except the stand-alone units (big$$).
Depends what small means.
I think you need a 10 CFM compressor for an HVLP gun.

[LarryG]

The good AND bad news is that you're not doing anything wrong. A truly lousy search function is one of the "features" of the vBulletin forum software.

Say you're shopping for a new rip blade. You enter that as a search term and get every thread that includes a message containing the word "rip" and also every thread that includes a message containing the word "blade." Somewhere in all there will probably be a few in which the two words are actually together, "rip blade," but you've got to find them manually. Argghhh!!!!

As Brian says you can narrow things down by searching only specific forums, but even that is not usually very satisfactory.

Another, extremely busy, forum I frequent uses vBulletin, and the old-timers are endlessly telling the newbies, "There have been a thousand threads on this, do a forum search." This conveniently ignores the fact that the search function is next to useless.

If anyone knows any undocumented tricks on how to get around this silliness, I'm sure we'd all love to read them!

[bigsteel15]

You could also Google the site and get real specific with the wording.

[LarryG]

Something I do, and it usually helps, is to search only the thread title, and if I know it, the name of the member who started it. For example just yesterday I wanted to look at all of my recent router polls, so I searched for "Router" in the title of threads started by me, and got 21 matches, the first six of which were my polls.

We could all improve the search function immensely by being careful to use a direct, no-nonsense title for any thread we start, rather than the too-often seen (and totally maddening, to me anyway) stuff like "Got a question" or "Need some help with this." The inclusion of one or two appropriate keywords in the thread title would make it a lot easier for folks to quickly find what they're looking for.

[LCHIEN]

The good AND bad news is that you're not doing anything wrong. A truly lousy search function is one of the "features" of the vBulletin forum software.

Say you're shopping for a new rip blade. You enter that as a search term and get every thread that includes a message containing the word "rip" and also every thread that includes a message containing the word "blade." Somewhere in all there will probably be a few in which the two words are actually together, "rip blade," but you've got to find them manually. Argghhh!!!!

As Brian says you can narrow things down by searching only specific forums, but even that is not usually very satisfactory.

Another, extremely busy, forum I frequent uses vBulletin, and the old-timers are endlessly telling the newbies, "There have been a thousand threads on this, do a forum search." This conveniently ignores the fact that the search function is next to useless.

If anyone knows any undocumented tricks on how to get around this silliness, I'm sure we'd all love to read them!

For the O.P., searching is a certain skill that improves with knowledge, practice and experience. KNowing how search algorithms works helps some. In your case the query is "What are some good choices of HVLP conversion gun if I only have a small compressor?"

you need to reduce it to key words that would have been used in a post about the subject. In this case, small compressor HLVP would be the key words (terms) I'd start with. In most cases with search engines, if you get few or no hits, decrease the number of terms (or try different combinations of fewer terms), if you get too many hits, increase the number of terms. In most tools, all the terms must be found to make a hit.




ACtually Larry, if you search on rip blade then the vBulletin search will omit the word "RIP" since it has 3 letters or less and only search for blade.

Since we commonly use TLAs (three letter acronyms) and 2-letter acronyms, you can forget searching for combinations of words like TS, BS, HF, DC, SMT, HD, etc.

I used to be able to pull up old threads I recalled and link them when a new post is started on a similar vein, but I have been very hard pressed to find my old threads using the present search. Just doesn't seem to wrk well.

[Jeffrey Schronce]

I've tried repeatedly to look things up so I won't be asking a question that has long hair on it from being so old - but I can never find anything. Yet this message board is very popular and has a lot of people answering every kind of question - so I must be using the Search wrong.

How would I get meaningful results for a question like, "What are some good choices of HVLP conversion gun if I only have a small compressor?"

I get either no results or a zillion results so that I end up having to read the whole history of the board. I'd like more useful results.

I think I may have suggested a search to you when you asked why no one ever mentions the Wagner HVLP sold by Gleem!
The search function is weak that is for sure, but I do get some results. Ya, you gotta spend a little time sorting through them since the search function is so limited. BUt when you go to Advanced Search, choose Tool Talk and then search HVLP you get a ton of results. Fortunately in such a generic question the titles help a long way in determining the value of the thread. 75% or more of the results in the above search were very relevant in my opinion.
Also if you put in say Compressor Craftsman, it will give threads with BOTH words in the thread preference in the results over items containing just one of the words.

[ElRay]

It's worse than that ...

I've had searches that can't even find articles I'm looking at.

I tried a search for 'PALefty' because I saw #2 and #3 of a series. The search only returned one of the (#2 or #3, don't remember), not both.

Also I searched for "freebizmag.com", having just read the thread where it was mentioned, and no results were found.

Combined with the robots file that blocks Google from indexing anything, it's hard to search for anything.

Ray