Searching at College Confidential

[redski59]

Hi,

I don't mean to offend anyone (esp. Roger and those who work so hard behind the scenes to keep CC alive), but it's very bothersome that the search engine refuses to look up 2-3 letter words. I tried to search the words "on campus job", but the engine gave me only "campus", which certainly is helpful! Is it possible that the engine could search 2-3 letter words?

Thanks!

[ksanders]

blame it on (cruddy) vBulletin. They could probably go in and edit the source, but the thing is.. I think the vBulletin team added this because of the shear number of results that would come back..

usually when i want to search for a three letter word.. i just do for example, FSU

search for "fsu*"

[redski59]

Thanks for the tip, ksanders. The asterisk (*) does work well for three letter words, but two letters still have problems.

Oh well, darn the vBulletin programmers.

[Roger_Dooley]

The problem is that the search algorithm isn't smart enough to not return a million results for "on" if you search for on campus jobs, so they exclude 'em. There's also an issue with search database size.

Actually, we can add specific short words to an "allowed" list for searching - you can search for sat, gre, etc. right now. We added "fsu" (Go Noles!) and a few other school abbreviations to the list.

Good tip on the asterisk (*), ksanders.

[Roger_Dooley]

You can also use quotes to get better search results, e.g., if I was looking for posts about campus work opportunities, I'd try searching "campus job" or "campus jobs" (WITH the quotes). That will avoid returning pages that are less relevant, e.g., "By the time I'm getting ready to leave campus, I hope I have at least a couple of job offers."

Here are a few more search tips:

Searching CC with Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Yet another approach is to let Google or another search engine help. For example, if you use this search string on Google
site:collegeconfidential.com on campus job
You'll get Google-quality results (they don't have a big problem with short or common words) AND you'll get results from this forum, as well as articles from the main College Confidential site, plus results from the "classic" college discussion forum that doesn't accept posts but is still there to read.

Similarly, you can search JUST the forum if you prefer by using a slightly different search string (using talk.collegeconfidential.com):
site:talk.collegeconfidential.com on campus job (illustrated with MSN - 425 results)
site:talk.collegeconfidential.com on campus job (illustrated with Yahoo - 372 results)
site:talk.collegeconfidential.com on campus job (illustrated with Google - 541 results)

Here's a more complex example that happens to use Google:
site:talk.collegeconfidential.com "computer science" "Carnegie Mellon"

So why use the CC Forum's own search engine? One reason is that the results are always up to date - the search engines are pulling pages from our site 24/7, but they may not have the most recent posts in their index. Another is to utilize the special features in the Advanced Search - you can search for posts by a particular member, you can specify a forum to search, you can also display your results as threads or individual posts, and much more. Plus, CC's internal forum search engine understands the structure of posts and threads, so you'll never get redundant or confusing results.

Searching Long Threads. Note, too, that you can search an individual thread at CC using the "Search This Thread" dropdown. This is handy if it's a multipage thread and you are looking for something specific.

[redski59]

Wow, this really helps Roger! Thanks a lot!

[Jusgimmethegun]

It's good to know you pay attention roger

[Gary King]

Originally Posted by ksanders

blame it on (cruddy) vBulletin. They could probably go in and edit the source, but the thing is.. I think the vBulletin team added this because of the shear number of results that would come back..

usually when i want to search for a three letter word.. i just do for example, FSU

search for "fsu*"

Ahem. I develop code for vBulletin software, and I must say, that you DON'T have to edit the source of the files. There is a simple option in the control panel for admins where they could simply change the minimum number of characters required for a word to be included in a search.

[ksanders]

Thanks for the info



i stand corrected