Thread: Searching and how hard it is here

It's kind of frustrating that I will get the result I want faster by opening a new window, going into google, and typing "MAP" + "NEMU" + "sr20" to get the results I'm looking for.

For example, today my brain was like 'I wonder what is the best MAP sensor for the VE engine'. I went to advanced search, clicked nismotronic, typed MAP, 'no results'. I would have to add "best" and "ve" to get anything, and those are pretty broad. Not sure why, but our forum has a damn tough time with one word quereys.

And acronyms? forget about it!

The best I can do right now is give folks a history lesson.

Feb. 2008:
http://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/3885-searching-titles-three-letter-words.html

Dec. 2009:
http://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/25610-searching-3-letter-words.html

April 2010:
http://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/30941-4-letter-search-minium-why.html
http://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/30879-forum-word-filter-tad-too-aggressive.html (a lot of search talk in here for some reason)

July 2012:
http://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/59958-better-search-option.html

Aug. 2012:
http://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/61236-searching-sucks.html

Feb. 2013:
http://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/65562-minimum-search-word-character-length.html


TL;DR - This has been an issue since The Beginning of Time. vBulletin really doesn't like to search for words less than 4 characters. It can be enabled, but the last time that was done all of the other forums we share our server with (including our forum) went offline for a day after searching for 3-letter strings was enabled. Henceforth refered to as The Dark Ages.
Because of The Dark Ages, enabling the feature has not been attempted since. In one of the above threads Cliff mentions that the problem may no longer be an issue with vBulletin versions 4.x and above. We are currently on 4.2.0. There may be hope yet.

If this feature is enabled, the entire database needs to be re-indexed which is likely the cause of The Dark Ages.

There is a section in the adminsitration panel where short string can be whitelisted to allow searching. The list includes such strings as "VE", "20V", "MAF', "TPS" and others. However, I'm not 100% confident this feature works as intended. I will look into it more. I will also paste the entire list here when I find it again.

History lesson?

It sucks and it still is a PITA to search. Lesson over.

Plus this place goes down every other week and when you type into google "sr20-f".... Why does it auto fill "sr20-forum down"?

There is a reason and it kills traffic here on both accounts. You would think with the plethora of acronyms that are associated with cars and parts that this would not exist.

Anyway, try this..

"MAP site:sr20-forum.com" or typing in anything else to replace 'MAP' on a google search. It searches only through this forum and will return results only from this forum. I just tried it and it worked. I dunno if it will find the information you are after but I see only results from sr20-forum.com

P.S. G20.net uses vBulletin 4.2.0 and has no problems like here sooooo what else is there to detail that cannot be replicated here?

Thanks for the tip Kyle. Having fun reading the search results...

asshole site:sr20-forum.com

"fuck off" site:sr20-forum.com

there is a sticky for the map conversion in the NismoTronic section.

google search is better unless it's a sub-forum which google doesn't have access to index like the classifieds

^^ I too use google dorks for all of my searching on this forum

I have only had to resort to outside search techniques a handful of times even with this stupid limitation.

I like to get all my ducks in a row by playing DuckDuckGoose.