performing exact search

[vambtym]

Hi messydesk,

Love the site and forum. Great stuff! Thank you!

Question: how do i perform an exact string search? +ing seems to return reordered matching keywords, i.e. +1890 +o +vam returns

1890 o vam
vam 1890 o
etc.

and in any matching order irrespective of relative distance of each keyword from each other within post.

I would like exact string match. "1890 o" to return only exact instances of string "1890 o".

Any way to do that? Forgive me if I missed some help text, but I don't think I came across instructions on how to do this.

[messydesk]

Good question, and glad you like the site. Normal, I'd say just to put it in quotes, and search for "1890-O". While this works fine for the Wiki (and can sometimes really speed up attribution if you know what to search for), there are some idiosyncrasies with the forum search such that it can be fooled by hyphens or single character words, like a mint mark. There are a few different search engines that I could configure, but the one I'm using is supposed to work best with this kind of search. I'll look around to see if there are better ways to handle this on the admin side, but experimenting doesn't look like it'll be a quick thing to do. You may also have discovered that searching for VAM doesn't do you any good, because it's too common of a word.

[vambtym]

thanks for your reply. yeah silo'd search is oft notoriously difficult to get practical success from. But thank you for considering it. vam is definitely a term to avoid

but running the search with duckduckgo actually sort of gives the desired result since this forum is publically indexed.

site:http://www.vamworld.com/forum/ "1889 o"

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ahttp%3 ... %22&ia=web