Internal Searching Wonders

[adhoustonj]

Hey AWF,
Do we include attachment & inserted tagged code in our site searches, and if not, is it possible?

I've been trying to search things on this site for the last month or two, who knows, one month feels like two months and then the next thing that you know, two months go by and it is only one month later... I know we upgraded this site recently, and have seen like 'solved' issues, but i don't think this is related to the latest site upgrade.

I pick up a lot of valuable tidbits here, and struggle to find them again later on.

For example:

@MajP has many examples of FromToList class examples, among one, two, three hundred others at a minimum that look like very useful features that i believe worthwhile and quality of life improvements to implement with my database users, Such as FromToList boxes.
If i search "FromToList" I get 1 post with 3 matches, and 1 post with 1 match, all post text.

If i go to google and search the following: "fromtolist" access-programmers.co.uk
1st post has 7 matches - 6 in tagged code, and 1 attachment
2nd post has 1 match
3rd post has 4 matches - 2 in tagged code, and 2 attachments

Just curious if this can be improved or if there are some kind of limitations? I know Google is a giant but we are so much stronger.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Part of your question requires understanding that we are running on a hosting package called Xenforo. Your search question depends, not on what the owner Jon can do, but what this commercial package does. At the moment, Jon is still working on fixing issues with a recent upgrade to a new version of the package, and I recall some discussion about the search features not being fully in place.

Not only that, but your question makes an unfair comparison. Goggle searches work so well because Google has implemented a very powerful language based search model that would be very hard to implement outright, given the years they have had to work on this search engine of theirs. This is a "David and Goliath" question but in this case, I hate to tell you this but Goliath usually wins for this case.

 

[MajP]

I pick up a lot of valuable tidbits here, and struggle to find them again later on

I use the Bookmark feature extensively. So if I make or see something useful I can save it and find it easily later, This feature works very well.

Post in thread 'Moving items between listboxes'

Mar 9, 2022

I added a demo of a Large From to List with about 10K available. But no issue doing any size. As set up I would think no problem handling a several 100k you would need to slightly modify the code once you get into the millions so that you never go over the 60k limit. It is a combination of a FAYT and a From to list. So you can filter as you like on the left side and select your records. Then you can search as needed on something else. In this example the left list starts blank then returns all words with "A" then "A" then "AAR".

If you list gets into the millions then you will have...

• MajP

 

[adhoustonj]

I just started using that bookmark feature yesterday. That should come in handy.

And @The_Doc_Man that explains it perfectly. I was just curious and have no idea how forum software such as Xenforo works. At first thought it seemed it would be easier to search all of our internal text versus an external entity, but yeah David and Goliath big time. Understood. Thanks!

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

I pick up a lot of valuable tidbits here, and struggle to find them again later on.

I believe Jon has fixed all of the problems with the built-in search facility, however if you are having problems you can use this link which uses Google to search the whole of access world forums:-

Google Advanced Search

 

[Gasman]

I thought @Jon had also purchased a better search facility?

 

[Jon]

Search on AWF was fixed. As for Google, you need to ask them!

 

[adhoustonj]

Search on AWF was fixed. As for Google, you need to ask them!

Understood. I hope this didn't come across as needing to be posted in Site Complaints instead of Site Suggestions - I only asked out of curiosity, and maybe I shouldn't even be asking this question here.

It is almost like searching inside a database on your local machine from windows explorer would return more records from inside that one database versus searching inside that database itself. And so far, @The_Doc_Man brought up Google's Language based search model which is the why, but I guess I was asking the how is that possible. I don't think my example comparison of windows explorer search is necessarily fair either, but that is why I was asking.

Is google just a massive webscraper to train and refine their model, they host so much on the internet, is the language that Xenforo software is built in different somehow, etc.. I know that have the waybackmachine and webarchives that save/cache websites at different dates to go back and reference, but yeah, it is just interesting.

 

[Jon]

Xenforo is different to Google, but cannot comment on the languages used.