Search function

[Townesw]

How do you use the search function on this forum? I can type in something to search for but I get a lot of unrelated stuff to go through and I may or may not find anything that I searched for. Are you supposed to use certain words or characters to do a search?

[John E Davies]

Search is a joke, it amazes me that it is so useless! It is about the slowest and worst I have seen on any forum, in years. It has no user settings at all and it is only accessible from the Forum main page..

 

1 - Use Google and put the term olivertraveltrailers.com in front of your search term. That may get you a few results.

 

2 - If you know who posted the topic you are after, go to their Profile page, select Forums and browse for the result you want.

 

3 -COMPLAIN to the webmaster and moderators until this gets replaced with a functional search engine.

 

John Davies

 

Spokane WA

 

 

[DavidS]

I agree with John that the search function on this forum is inadequate. I have complained about it several times before.

 

In an earlier post, Jason said that the searches are ajax based and searches are performed in real time. I am not a programmer, but I have worked with IT specialists in developing my department’s web site, and my understanding of ajax searches is that the search results are shown as you type, and the search results narrow as you continue typing. This type of auto-complete, based upon text strings within the website, is enormously powerful. You see this auto-compete in a Google search. Clearly the Oliver Forum search engine does not do this.

 

I do want to provide a short tutorial on Google searches. Really good information HERE, and maybe too much information HERE.

 

John provides a good suggestion

 

1 – Use Google and put the term olivertraveltrailers.com in front of your search term. That may get you a few results.

But there is a better way. If you put “site:” before olivertraveltrailers.com, as in “site:olivertraveltrailers.com” you limit the search to that one domain.

 

You can exclude hits with specific words. Suppose you search for “propane tank” but you get a lot of hits about barbeques, then you can exclude barbecues with a minus sign before the offending word. The search would be “propane tank -barbeque”or even “propane tank -barbeque -bbq”.

 

You can use quotation marks to demand an exact match. Suppose you search for quick connect in the search “site:olivertraveltrailers.com quick connect” and you find pages with both words (or only one of the words) anywhere on the page. A search for “site:olivertraveltrailers.com “quick connect”” demands the consecutive words, in a phrase. (I hope you are not confused by the nested quotation marks; the outermost marks delimit what is going into the search field.)

 

You can also use the Boolean Operators AND and OR in your searches. Examples:

“”quick connect” AND water”

“”quick connect” AND propane OR LP”

 

You can also use asterisks as wild cards in your searches.

 

If you go to FiberglassRV Forum, you can search the entire post, or search only the title. Searching the title can be an excellent strategy. We cannot do that with the Oliver Forum search tools, but there is a work around with the terms intitle: and allintitle:

For example, “site:olivertraveltrailers.com/ lubrication intitle:jacks” finds pages with the word "lubrication" and with the word "jacks" in the title. Note that the singular jack did not work, because the title had jacks.

 

Hope this helps.

[ShallowGal]

DavidS, that's good stuff & explained very well! Thank you!

[Rumline]

Interesting. When I tried the Google method that David outlined last year there were few to no results from the Forum section, as if Oliver had blocked Google from indexing the forum. It's good to see that has changed now.