Searching

[swill453]

The search facility on the board is a little, er, idiosyncratic.

I don't know if what I'm posting here is a moan, a question, or passing on a useful tip for others.

First off, there doesn't seem to be any concept of a phrase search. For example if I search for "lettings relief" using the double quote format typical in, say, Google searches, then it finds all posts that contain the words 'lettings' and 'relief', even those that don't have the phrase. Is there some other way of looking for phrases that I've missed?

Here's the tip though - What I actually wanted to search for was the phrase "tax relief". Unfortunately it responds with "ignored: tax" because it refuses to search for words of 3 letters or less. However if I use the wildcard facility and look for "tax* relief", it returns all posts containing any word starting with 'tax...', including the word 'tax' itself! (And 'relief' of course.)

Seems a little bizarre that it can obviously search for 3 letter words, just not if you ask it directly!

Scott.

[Itsallaguess]

For example if I search for "lettings relief" using the double quote format typical in, say, Google searches, then it finds all posts that contain the words 'lettings' and 'relief', even those that don't have the phrase. Is there some other way of looking for phrases that I've missed?

Here's the tip though - What I actually wanted to search for was the phrase "tax relief". Unfortunately it responds with "ignored: tax" because it refuses to search for words of 3 letters or less. However if I use the wildcard facility and look for "tax* relief", it returns all posts containing any word starting with 'tax...', including the word 'tax' itself! (And 'relief' of course.)

The search facility does have some issues with common words and words with a small number of characters.

On those occasions where it doesn't want to play ball with my search-requests, then I find using the "Site:www.lemonfool.co.uk" option in Google to be the best method of finding what I'm after. You can use this Google-search option to force the search to only look at a single website, and then you can also put phrases in double-quotes, so the particular search that you're looking for would look like this -



This would result in this set of search-results -

https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Awww.lemonfool.co.uk+%22lettings+relief%22&btnK=Google+Search

Cheers,

Itsallaguess