Forum search almost useless

I’m finding the search to be near useless. I’m not sure whether this has been broken in the recent forum software update, but let me give an example.

I want to search for “page up” - I’ve found a scenario in dorico 1.1 where the “page up” button doesn’t do what’s expected, and want to see whether anyone else has queried it.

I search for page up.
All 11751 threads containing “page” or “up” are returned.
I search for “page up”.
11751 results.
I search for page.
11751 results.
I search those 11751 results for up.
11751 results (with the note “up ignored”).

Am I doing something wrong?

You might find that using Google to search the forum is more helpful. In Chrome, for example, you can set up custom search providers in Settings > Manage Search Engines.

For “Search engine”, give it a helpful title like “Dorico Forum”.

For “Keyword”, type something you want to type into the address bar as a prefix for searching the forum: I went for “dorfor” (not something I’m likely to type by accident)

And for “Url with %s in place of query” I specified:

https://www.google.co.uk/#safe=off&q=site:www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f%3D246%20%s

Once you’ve added this, you can type e.g. dorfor “page up” into the address bar of your browser, and Google will search just this forum for the exact words “page up”. Hope this helps.

Many thanks Daniel - I’ll investigate your suggestion.

Great idea, Daniel - but that seems to search ALL Steinberg forums rather than just Dorico’s (?)

• dj

Well, that’s what the “f=246” bit is supposed to do. If I can’t improve phpBB’s search, I’m afraid I really can’t improve Google’s.

You can always add the word Dorico to your search term. It’s not perfect as it will pick up instances on the Nuendo forum (etc.) where users have Dorico in their signature or name Dorico in their post, but it’s a help.

Google search is much better than the typical search engines in most forums. I typed this in my search bar:

Dorico “Page up”

And this very post was the second result returned. Two quick hints:

• If you’re looking for a phrase put it in quotes: “Page up” will search for the phrase “page up” as opposed to the two individual words.
• Use a minus sign if you want to exclude results that have a particular string (or phrase). E.g., if you did not want to see pages that had the word “print” in them, you would type this in your search engine:

Dorico “Page up” -print

I’ve used the Google search as well - type the topic and word Dorico; seems to work nearly every time.