PlayStation Development Network

Posted: **August 23rd, 2014, 1:42 am**

Is there some way to improve the forum search function? Sometimes it might be useful, but my experiences are that it's often not working. Some examples:

Searching for "PU":

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The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: pu.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 3 characters
and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

PU is the prefix for older PSX mainboards, a rather important search term in PSX world, but I wouldn't say that it is "too common".

Searching for "PU-18":

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No posts were found because the word pu-18 is not contained in any post.

PU-18 is a specific PSX mainboard (and it is mentioned in several forum pages).

Searching for "GTE":
Well, that's working. It returns all posts where somebody has mentioned the "GTE" (which is quite a mess of roughly topic related information, but that's okay for a forum search function) (nonetheless it would be nicer to have the relevant GTE info collected on a wiki page).

Cool would be: an english wiki and a working forum search function.

Posted: **August 23rd, 2014, 11:54 am**

I agree that the search isn't the best. I've tried in the past to search for 'DTL-H2000', and it does nothing. I've had to manually find the topic I was after which I thought was absolutely stupid.

I actually just deleted the old index and recreated a new one. I've never done it before, but something interesting I just found was that if you search for 'DTL-H2000' it does nothing, but if you search for 'DTL H2000' (without the dash/hyphen) you get results. I believe the idea is to enter only KEYWORDS. In your case, 'PU 18' returns results, or entering '(pu|18)' will as well.

Posted: **August 24th, 2014, 12:47 am**

Back then "PU 18" didn't work either due to the 2-letter limit. But that limit is gone now. Thanks!

The "-" in "PU-18" does probably translate to "PU" excluding "18". Using "-" to exclude something is quite common for search engines, but normally, the exclusion shouldn't happen when enclosing it in double quotes, and it should happen only if the "-" is preceeded by a space character, ie.

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PU-18    ;search "PU-18"
PU -18   ;search "PU" exluding pages that do contain "18"
"PU-18"  ;search "PU-18"
"PU -18" ;search "PU -18"

At least, google seems to work like that, and it does kinda make sense in so far that it's producing the intended results.

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