A question about searching

[Indianna]

Hi Sylvia!

I have run across a puzzle which I hope you can solve.  The problem may be with my search parameters, but I have tried a couple of different things and can't seem to figure it out.  Here's the situation:

Given the recent renewed discussion about voting in the Focus online poll and the continued curiosity about developments with the collector's club, I thought that I would like to review the discussion history of the collector's club concept here at PF.  So, I set up this search:
my search results

My search criteria were:  club clubs, match any word, show results as messages, oldest topics first, search in "General"

This yielded 4 pages of results starting in Feb 2006 up to the present day, but there seem to be some relevant posts that were not included.  For example,

In this post: http://www.playmofriends.com/forum/index.php?topic=2115.msg22979;topicseen#msg22979
Richard quotes a previous post made by me which includes the word "club" but my original post does not appear in the search results.     This makes me wonder if other relevant posts as also being missed in this search.  Is it the way I am setting up the search?  Or is it a potential problem with the way that the search function works? 

[tonguello]

Hi Sylvia and Indianna!
I 've been thinking about asking Sylvia via PM something on a related matter, but as it has a little to do with this topic that Indianna started I decided to post it here. Forgive me Indianna if it is a mistake, be free to move it if necesary....
I've been wanting to ask Sylvia the following:
Is there a chance to create some kind of private folder for all members of course (like MY MESSAGES folder) where we can save certain number of favorite topics? So we wouldn't have to look (as hard as it can be sometimes) for some topic months after we read it or wrote in it? It is a question and a suggestion..... 
Best regards.
Gaston

[playmofire]

Which forum you search in influences the results you retrieve in my experience.  If you search in the Home forum, the search covers all the forums open to you.  If you search in, say, the Custom Gallery forum, the search only covers that forum.  To illustrate, a search on "club" in the Home forum brings up six pages of results, but in the Custom Gallery forum it brings up one page.

[Indianna]

Hi Gordon!

I set up the search within just the "General" area because searching the whole forum yielded a lot of results about club soda and lots of custom figures involving clubs of the "beating- with-a" kind. 

The weird thing is that, in the example I gave above, it showed Richard's post (from the Report &Review forum) which only had the word "club" in it because he had quoted my post which did have the word "club" in it, but my original post (also from the Report & Review forum a few hours earlier on the same day) did not show up in the search results.   

[Sylvia]

I don't know how to solve this, Anne. I've noticed a few similar errors when searching for topics in the past, so it's probably a software glitch. Hopefully it'll be fixed when I upgrade to a higher version of SMF.

Gaston, there is no facility to bookmark favourite topics within the current version. The only thing I can suggest is making a PlaymoFriends folder in your browsers "Favourite" menu and saving the first page of important topics there. I know it's not an ideal solution, but it's all that can be done at the moment.

[Indianna]

Thanks, Sylvia!  Here's hoping that will take care of the problem. 

[tonguello]

I don't know how to solve this, Anne. I've noticed a few similar errors when searching for topics in the past, so it's probably a software glitch. Hopefully it'll be fixed when I upgrade to a higher version of SMF.

Gaston, there is no facility to bookmark favourite topics within the current version. The only thing I can suggest is making a PlaymoFriends folder in your browsers "Favourite" menu and saving the first page of important topics there. I know it's not an ideal solution, but it's all that can be done at the moment.

Thank you Sylvia, I'll do that! 

[skypurr]

I tried searching for a link that I thought I'd seen that someone gave to a collection of photos of Playpeople sets that someone had made and tried different combinations to try to find it but gave up eventually. 
It did throw up some quite interesting topics that I hadn't seen though, so my time wasn't wasted. 

Elaine

[Indianna]

. . . It did throw up some quite interesting topics that I hadn't seen though, so my time wasn't wasted.  . . .

I know what you mean - sort of like sitting down with a dictionary or encyclopedia - you end up in all sorts of interesting spots!

A really weird thing in my situation, though, was that very few of my own posts came up in my search - they only seemed to be included in cases where I had also started the topic.  It's enough to make a person feel paranoid!