Salix OS

... it's still useful if you use multiple search terms.

Maybe users could be invited to refine their search if they pick a common term. But if there is no operational reason against it, it would be more straightforward to just remove the restriction.

Yes, the integrated search function of phpBB kinda sucks. Especially in such cases I fall back to google using site:salixos.org/forum which generally is much better anyway.

Thanks for the tip, Shador.

I've changed the settings for common words, maybe it's better now. What are the common words you've tried?

Some obviously common words such as "file" might still be useful in refining a search. In this case, it was "Firefox" - I was looking for a discussion I think I remember about profiles. I think I tried "Firefox configuration", which just gave me the results for "configuration". Or maybe that was too common too, can't remember now.

Unless there are implications such as overuse of bandwidth, I don't see the use of a feature to exclude common search terms. If you get too many results, you refine the search, and maybe gradually come to search more intelligently in future.

However, I often "think by searching". (Heuristically?) So in a search engine I might do a search for something like "wireless", and the words that appear in the first few hits of the many hundreds suggest ways to refine my search, such as "card" or "-driver" (because I am interested in something else to do with wireless, not drivers).

For now I've just increased the threshold for common words. I did not want to disable it completely because it is obviously there for a reason: CPU time. Maybe it doesn't even matter on a quite small forum like this. I still can increase this threshold further and there is also the option to switch to a mysql search backend instead of the standard phpbb backend, which I guess is the better one anyway. I'll first talk about it with Akuna.

That certainly solves this example: a search for "firefox" yields ~600 results, adding "profile" reduces that to 28. A lot of "clean profile", so adding "-clean" gives 21 somewhat more varied results.

That's a huge improvement and maybe enough for practical purposes.

I've switched the search backend now, give it a try and report pros/cons.

EDIT: now it's possible to search a phrase, e.g. "search backend".