Power searching TFW

Discussion in 'TFW2005 Tech Support' started by optimusfan, Jun 9, 2013.

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  1. optimusfan

    optimusfan Kill your heroes Administrator TFW2005 Supporter

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    vBulletin's built in search isn't very good. This is painfully obvious especially when trying to search the Junkion Exchange. Searching for "Megatron" yields thousands of results, and trying to narrow your search to say "united Megatron" flat out doesn't work.

    So, how do we get better search results? When searching TFW I use a combination of the search here as well as Google. Google has a lesser-known "site" search term that allows you to search only one particular site. For example, search Google with the following terms:

    "united megatron" site:tfw2005.com - Google Search

    This limits your search to just results on TFW. At some point I started playing around with the feature and realized that I could make it much more specific. For example:

    "united megatron" site:tfw2005.com/boards - Google Search

    limits results to anywhere on the boards. Further:

    "united megatron" site:tfw2005.com/boards - Google Search

    limits the search just to the B/S/T section of the Junkion Exchange. And, of course once you have those results you can do things like click on "Search Tools" and then use the "Any Time" drop down to limit your results to the past year, past month, a custom date range, etc. This is particularly useful when wading through the Junkion looking for current sales.

    Lastly, you can narrow down a search even to a particular thread if you'd like. For example, if you wanted to search the "Let's See Some Cool Stuff" thread, you could do the following using our pattern from above:

    Code:
    megatron site:http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transformers-toy-discussion/747812-lets-see-some-cool-stuff-2013-tf-edition-rules-first-post.html[
    
    Not terribly useful as it only searches the first page of that thread, but you can truncate the page URL down to a common root to have it search all pages for that thread. Basically, you need to cut off the URL just after the thread number:

    Code:
    megatron site:http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/transformers-toy-discussion/747812
    https://www.google.com/search?q="un...com/boards/transformers-toy-discussion/747812

    Please let me know if you have any other tips for searching the site!
     
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