Only 1 word search?

[robdragon 167]

Not sure as to where this should go feel free to move to correct thread.

I've noticed for a while now but to lazy to ask. But I'm only able to do 1 word searches  for instance water mods won't fly all I get is no results. But if I use water or mods then I get thousands of results which is no fun to go through when you are looking just for water mods. It's not just water mods but any search more than 1 word I get 0 results.

I figure I'm just not using the right syntax.

Any help would be appreciated

[Yarahi 1,816]

Seems like the STEX uses the same rule as the game itself

Simply enclose any search terms longer than 1 word in quotation marks like so; "water mods"

[CorinaMarie 29,618]

3 hours ago, robdragon said:

Not sure as to where this should go feel free to move to correct thread.

You picked a very good place to post it! It's related to the use of the Simtropolis site.

 

3 hours ago, robdragon said:

water mods

For this specific search, may I recommend: Cori's Water Shoppe ?

 

But yeah, in general our board's search engine is weak at best. That'll all change when we get elasti-search in the 4.3 update. (There's no definitive time established yet for when that'll be as other developers are working on updates to some of the plugins we use which don't currently play nice with the 4.3 version.)

Right now Google searching is the best method. Use xxx site:community.simtropolis.com/files/ for our STEX replacing the "xxx" part with what you are seeking and the similar one for Devotion's LEX is xxx site:sc4devotion.com/csxlex/ also replacing "xxx" with your search word(s). For searching each site's entire forums use the same on Google, but reduce the location part to site:simtropolis.com for here and site:sc4devotion.com for there.

[Cyclone Boom 16,938]

Hi robdragon,

As @Yarahi said, enclosing terms in quotes will allow them to be processed as direct matches where it'll only look for that and nothing else. This can be particularly useful when searching in titles, since often content items have common phrases in there which describe what they are.

You may find the Advanced Search page helpful to provide a few more options. With the quick search option in the top right of each page, I've noticed for some reason it automatically substitutes a "+" for spaces, which then throws off the results. This is almost certainly a bug which can be reported. I believe this should be ignored as an operator modifier, not used as the actual terms in queries. Whereas if typing in the term from the search bar on the dedicated page, it then preserves spaces between words.

The main filter options available on the Advanced page are as follows:

Here the titles only option can be selected, where the default will also look inside the text within the posted content (e.g. descriptions for files).

The "Contain any of my search term words" option will add an OR criteria, meaning any words you type as the search query will be checked for in the area specified. This is really the opposite of the exact match using quotes. If a term cannot be located, it will show results for the others which can be found.

Once the results page is shown, it might be worth toggling over the Sort By option to "Relevancy". This will attempt to rank the list of items by what it considers are more related to the term being searched. However I've found this brings no guarantee that what the software considers relevant is what really should be most applicable. As @CorinaMarie said, the current engine really does have limitations which understandably makes it far from a reliable means of finding what you're looking for.

[robdragon 167]

@CorinaMarie You are AWESOME!!

Great work!    And thanks to @Yarahi

and thanks to @Cyclone Boom for your suggestions.

Yes I will have too use google for now on until they get those upgrades done. Or at least put my search in quotes.