'Search Site' produces poor results?

[Captain Planet]

First of all I think this site is a fantastic resource.

Is it just me or does the 'Search site' facility stink? I think it's one of the worst search engines I've encountered on the web.

Whenever I do a search, it produces too many irrelevant results!! I think the results should be sorted by relevance (maybe as a %age) as opposed to some kind of 'keyword' search displaying randomly relevant results. Sometimes I find my answer is on page 8 (of the displayed results) and further on!

Just my opinion anyway.

[jstarkey]

Can you provide an example search? Also, we've been working on this the past couple years: the only way we can provide good results is if the description fields are relevant. We try to make sure they are, but can't edit every submission. We normally reject them and ask for the submitter to resubmit with a better description.

[Dogboy73]

Not quite related but - It's a shame you can't search in specific fields in the forums - For example, I wanted to find an older thread I'd started to reference some information someone had given me. If I could have searched by user for posts made by 'Dogboy73' I would have found it straight away. But searching by user name just returned a single thread were someone had responded to a question I posted & used my name in the reply. In the end I had to go back through the threads a page at a time until I found my old thread.

[jstarkey]

There's an option to view by post in the bottom left of the search form. Have you tried that? I may not be following.