Searching askaboutmoney

Brendan Burgess

Brendan Burgess

Founder
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Since we switched our hosting provider the inbuilt search system should be working better. I would be interested in getting feedback on it.

Up to now, I have used Google to search askaboutmoney entering the following site:www.askaboutmoney.com Investing for children


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Using the default search on askaboutmoney gives similar results

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The Advanced option
  • allows you to put in a date range e.g. posts since 1/1/2020
  • It allows you to put in a poster - if you know that the post you want was by Tom Edison, you can put his name into the search
  • You can search by date order instead of relevance, although I have found this to produce all sorts of irrelevant posts
  • As you type in the terms, it actually suggests some threads immediately - i.e. you don't need to press search (I found this distracting)

both askaboutmoney searches seem to use "for" as a search term whereas Google seems to ignore it.
 
Hi Brendan,

That sounds handy so must keep an eye out. Like you I've been using the Google option to-date.

I just tested the Default Search as compared to the options thrown up automatically when one goes to start a new thread and the Default appears to show a few more. Obviously the tighter the search criteria used the better the results.
 
Another advantage of the inbuilt search engine over Google is that we have configured it so that it gives priority to threads where the search term is in the title.
 
The related posts showing dates/ages/titles is very useful when making a new thread. I suppose more than ever now having meaningful thread titles is important. I like the new search function, thanks.
 
Last edited:
There was a problem with it searching for short words like "I" and "the" so we have temporarily replaced it with the Google search function.
 
AAM poster - 'Apologies but I couldn't find the answer to this specific question' (We all read it and sigh ;-))

AAM - 'We're not big on accuracy here so here are 748 results. Get stuck in'. Or, 'If you wait long enough Clubman will do the search for you.'

'We want you to search the website, because the question will have been asked before, but we won't allow you an advance option where you can really nail it down to specifics. Happy to answer the same question over and over because we've got nothing but time here. We need to feed on new posts or we'll die.'

:-)
 
Ah, to be fair, the majority of my searches were by poster as I was usually looking for posts that I had some recollection of. When not searching by poster I would use site:askaboutmoney.com in Google.
 
michaelm said:
the majority of my searches were by poster as I was usually looking for posts that I had some recollection of.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Much easier to debunk information when you can search by forum/thread/poster and word. Not sure if accuracy of information is important to the forum, in general, but it would be to me.
 
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