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Exact phrase search? and other functions

  • December 17, 2010 at 12:52 pm

    #230893

    This is a copy/paste of an email I sent to the webmaster address. Thought I'd post it here for discussion and to hear anyone's thoughts:

    Hi! Thanks for offering the very helpful website.

    I have some issues with the search functionality – There is so much great information on the site, it’s a shame that the search functions are so limited. For example, if I go to the forum search and choose “exact match” search, and enter the string “create nonclustered index” without quotes, the hits that come up don’t necessarily have those 3 words in that order, which is what I would expect of an exact phrase search.

    In fact, I’ve even had instances where I selected “ALL keywords” option and it also gave me results with one keyword and not the other (I don’t have an example handy).

    Anyway, with so many bright SQL programmers involved, isn’t there a way to beef up the search functions on the site? It would be great to have numerous advanced search options that work. For example, you currently have two types of search: The first one is accessed from the search box near the top/right of the page (I think it’s a Google custom search, but not sure). That search allows you to select whether to search forums, articles, blogs, etc. However it has very limited options – no exact phrase, no choice whether to search title or contents, etc. The other (forum-specific) search has more options but they don’t seem to work.

    If those two search types could be combined, and add some great helpful search options (e.g. true exact phrase, and AND/OR logic that really works), I think it would do a lot for the site’s usability. And probably avoid users asking a question which has already been answered, because they’d have better access to that information.

    Thanks!

  • December 17, 2010 at 6:10 pm

    #1264308

    Thanks for the note, and we will discuss this in 2011 as a possible project. It would be nice to get some better search functionality working.

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