Advanced Search in the forum
Hera
Posts: 1,957
Hi!
How do I perform advanced search in the forums? Like two or several words together (like "Scifi Lab"). One word without another word (like Skirt -V4) or all words starting with something (like Horse*) or ending with something (*car). I cannot seem to get the regular wrackets and wildcards to work. Neither have I figured out how to search in just one category or to search among posts later than or prior to. I tried clicking the cogwheels up to the right but they don't seem to do anything when it comes to search.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Use Google site search...and no, that's not being facetious. The forum search is just too simplistic/limited.
Cheee... will wonders never cease eh! No Boolean search, and a proper, alphabetical A to Z index is just a dream!!!
I wonder if anyone has the URL for the forums content from before the previous change, eg. the stuff from 2+ years ago?
Umm...the stuff that had become the forumarchive?
It's gone...
Google is really the best way.
!!!
Like a lot of new people in 3D Town, I carry several guns that you can see + a lot of hidden weapons that only I know about. Usually overcome with the excitement of it all, <twang hic slam blam!> I tend to come in to any "new" area with my render guns blazing; few ideas are captured and there's no bulletproof note-taking whatsover... I used to think that my only real friends were the stored web pages ("Save Page As...") that they could try and pry out of my cold dead hard drive, but of recent I've gotten a bit slack, *sigh*.
If what I think you're suggesting is true, and places like the Internet Archive are not helpful then that is a considerable loss. Wow.
The IA is very hit and miss...and seldom does more than the first page of a long thread...and no images.
The lack of a solid search feature is the biggest fail of the new forums... I'm currently looking for a thread that I saw no more than 2 weeks ago, which answered the question I have right now... but instead of simple searching the forums, I'm likely going to have to ask the same question again.... seems like a bit of a waste.to me. I have not known another forum site that doesn't have a decent search... (in case anyone sees this and knows the thread, it was the one about splitting morphs using a .cr2 editor)
I do agree however, as much as I hate it, I find google search actually gets me closer to my answers than the onsite search... (which really sucks if you believe google is a evil entity bound to suck up all the info, and "clean" it for you)
Is there a way to use google to search for an exact phrase? For some reason I though you could do it by just putting it in quotes, but apparently I'm mistaken on that point.
Huh??? I usually do the Advanced Search and I put any relevant phrase in quotes. Just now I searched myself, eg. firstname lastname in quotes followed by the name of my city and sure enough it returned the exact page that I wanted.
Here's a silly example, I just put a bunch of random words together as a phrase. Note that google returns 843,000 results, with the top ones showing that it's actually only matching the individual words separately, and not matching the phrase; if you visit the site and search for the phrase, it's not there. So if I want to search for something specific, I can't find it unless I get lucky (which in fact you will with some of the more common phrases, which is why I thought it worked at first.)
Whoops, just realized my example had "no results found". Perhaps the quotes do work for things that have been indexed, and the things I've been searching for were not yet indexed (recent posts, for example?)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that if you type "Giant PURPLE Anteater" say (without the colored text of course) the system will do a genuine search, and the results you get tells you that other than stuffed toys there is no such animal. For a better test choose something that's real.
One thing I'm not sure of is hyphens and how that is handled, and with some terms like "double-yellow Amazon parrot" say there may not be a standard phrase; some people use a hyphen and some don't... not sure what Google does in this case.
If the forums had a decent search then you could also find about "such and such model good" or "this other model causes problems". I'm not a big fan of sites that have 5 stars for this and that but maybe DAZ might benefit from an ability to rate models, and compare ratings... as it is there is definitely different classes of models emerging, for example old ones and new ones... they can be very different and yet it's often not easy to tell.