Should we consider a Google search box?

[fred]

Hi all,

I suspect some of you will have had the same experience; the search function on the forum is pretty useless. I had a degu emergency the other day and needed to find something urgently. No luck whatsoever! The word I needed to look for had only three letters and there was nothing I could do about it - Proboards doesn't allow. I also wanted to search the whole of the forum, but as usual only got error messages that it was taking too long.

Now, as I understand it, there is nothing our mods could do about it. It is a shortcoming of Proboards and we have to live with it. Proboards do have an option to include a Google search box to search specifically the posts on a forum, but it is currently not working. As far as I can see from the Proboards support board, it is not likely that it will come back any time soon. However, it seems there are ways to get around this and add such a search box. If there is interest, I could look a bit more into this.

On the other hand, I am increasingly weary about Google's creeping invasion of our privacy. On balance though I would find it more important to find information on the forum quickly and easily. What do others think about this?

[amie]

I'd be ok with this. What does everyone else think?

[Deleted]

I agree that the search function here is quite useless.
I've long since used the advanced search function of Google whenever I need to find something here: here is the link.
In a regular search, insert site:http://deguworld.proboards.com in first, then a space and then the term you wish to search for.
The page can be bookmarked for easy access.
But it would of course be better to have a working searchbox implemented on the page

[fred]

Jan 27, 2012 10:51:55 GMT @stormsong said:

I've long since used the advanced search function of Google whenever I need to find something. In a regular search, insert site:http://deguworld.proboards.com in first, then a space and then the term you wish to search for.

That's what I am doing too. The reason why I still try the forum's search function is that it returns only one match per post and orders the matches by date.

An alternative to the search box could be to put the advice you have given somewhere prominent on the forum page.

[malteser60]

The search here is useless. I've given up using it and just tend to trawl through the posts. Need to start bookmarking all the important ones really. The google search engine is the easiest and more sensible one to install however, as fred says, they do invade your privacy quite a bit. I suppose we'll just be aiding google's knowledge of degus

Can you send me the link fred on how to implement the workaround. Again this might need the go-ahead from sunshinemeg.

[fred]

Jan 27, 2012 11:55:19 GMT malteser60 said:

Can you send me the link fred on how to implement the workaround.

I haven't yet researched this in detail. There seem to be several possibilities. You can do a search on Google with:

site:support.proboards.com

[davx]

Whats about htdig or other local crawlers?
Your letter problem is a common one among forum software.