Search Error

[Marnath]

I've been having trouble with the search function. Sometimes it takes me to a blank page instead of doing anything. The only way I've found to get around it is just to wait for an hour or so. Is this a new thing, or have I just run into one of the symptoms of server congestion that I hadn't seen yet?

The url for the blank page is: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/search.php?do=process

[Chess435]

Protip: Don't use the search function on this site. It doesn't really work. Instead, run a Google Search starting with site:giantitp.com for only search results within this site.

[Serpentine]

Time to "just use Google": 3... 2... Oh wait.

:sigh:

[Shhalahr Windrider]

How do you suggest using Google to just search thread titles, or to search for posts by a specific user, or to just search a specific forum?

[Renegade Paladin]

You can't directly, but considering that the board search has been broken for years with no signs of it getting any better despite periodic threads on the subject in this forum, there's not a better alternative to suggest.

Skilled Google-fu can, of course, get you fairly close by including the name of the poster you're looking for, the name of the forum you want to search in in quotes, etc in your search terms, but that's the best you're going to get.

[Killer Angel]

Protip: Don't use the search function on this site. It doesn't really work.

Still, the search function gave me problems only in the last few months... before september, it worked almost always fine for me. Was I just lucky?

[Shhalahr Windrider]

Whether or not the search works is rather hit and miss. You were lucky before September. You may be lucky again with future searches.

My point about more refined searches was that “just use Google” is no the one-size-fits-all solution a lot of folks present it as. If you are just using the search box that appears in the toolbar at the top of every forum page—yeah, that can be pretty well replicated with Google. But if you need to use anything from the Advanced Search page, go ahead and use the site search, and there’s a good chance it will work.

Quite frankly, while it does occasionally break, I have found the site search to be more reliable than a lot of people give it credit for. Not perfectly reliable, mind you. But reliable enough to use when I have oddly specific queries.

[Serpentine]

The really frustrating thing is when it seems to be a particular combination of terms and preferences that are causing the problem, and no matter how many times you try to do your search the same error keeps coming up every single time. What's more, a lot of the time this happens when it's something fairly complicated that you just can't get the same search results in Google.