scrimja Posted March 16, 2010 Report Share Posted March 16, 2010 This How To will help Zoners, both new and old, to find what they are looking for with greater ease. It came about after seeing the innumerable posts of 'Search is your friend' and 'Use the search function!' etc. etc. This often results in people posting back saying that they had tried but couldn't find what they were looking for. This is due mainly to the way that the search function of E46Zone behaves. If, for example, you want to find out about angel eyes, but you want to specifically find out about facelift angel eyes and you use this as a search term, over 1000 results are found. Clearly, this isn't going to be very helpful and it'd be much easier to just start a new thread and accept the inevitable flaming that will ensue. The reason behind so many results is that the search function searches for 'facelift', 'angel' and 'eyes' whereas you really want to search for 'facelift angel eyes' all as one phrase. Now, I have tried to search by phrase using the existing system, but I can't get it to work. However, if you use google you can get fewer results, thus increasing the chance of finding what you want. Using Google to search through E46Zone is very simple! Go to Google and type in the search term you are looking for followed by site:e46zone.com. You now have 78 results rather than 1000+ as Google is searching for threads that contain all three of the words not just 1 of the words. Google also has a more detailed search option available. If for example (and this is a very poor example as you will see, but I can't think of anything better at the moment!) you wanted to search for 'ski hatch', whether it be to find out what it is for, how to remove it etc., you can type ski hatch into Google using the system above and return 46 results - If, however you want to narrow it down further you can encase your search term within two " speech marks ". This will search for threads that contain 'ski hatch' as an exact phrase, rather than just threads that contain both words somewhere within them. This will return 44 results (hence why it is a bad example as it doesn't reduce the results too dramatically, but would be helpful on other searches) - One last point, if you want to search for an exact phrase and other supporting words that it also possible. For example, if you wanted to search for information on your coupe's broken spring and typed "coupe broken spring" site:e46zone.com and realised that there were no results, you could search for - coupe "broken spring" which would return 3 results - No doubt there are many other ways of utilising the Google search function, or even better search engines to use, but I hope that this guide helps making searching that little bit easier! I'm happy to add any other ways of improving search results in if people suggest them to me. James Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simonlpearce Posted March 16, 2010 Report Share Posted March 16, 2010 Moved to site help, good work though fella hopefully this will make the forum a little more accessible for old and new! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
duffman Posted March 16, 2010 Report Share Posted March 16, 2010 great work mate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mit Posted March 17, 2010 Report Share Posted March 17, 2010 Pretty sad that google's crawler works better than the built in forum search though. Perhaps Sam might consider a google search module instead? I know a few other forums I've been on have google search instead of the forum's own search. It might reduce load on the server if it doesn't have to do any indexing too Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
