Cross topic search reqiest

[simsim314]

I was searching LifeWiki in General and got no thread for it. Assuming this is the correct place I've opened a thread on this topic. Not sure this is needed but can we have a search accross tha whole site?

[wildmyron]

This is possible from the forum search page, but unfortunately there's no direct link to it from the front page. However, on any search results page you can "Return to advanced search" which is a link to the search page. I remember it being discussed years ago, and dvgrn mentioning that he normally uses "View your posts" as an indirect route to get there. I presume it is one of those things that requires Nathaniel to make a change in the forum configuration but which he's never got around to doing (or been aware that there was a desire for it).

[simsim314]

This is possible from the forum search page

Thanks!

Maybe it will be enough just adding a button to the ConwayLife.com bunner in the right corner, called "search site" or something. Or Home, LifeWiki, Forums, Download golly + Search site.

[Macbi]

On a related topic, I've noticed that Google is getting worse at searching the forum. It used to be that if you entered your search along with "site:conwaylife.com" then it would find every page on the forum where those words appeared. But now it only sometimes finds the page you're looking for. For example I used the phrase "If you want a 2-cell high-period oscillator the two cells have to be one cell apart orthogonally" on this page, but if you type '"If you want a 2-cell high-period oscillator the two cells have to be one cell apart orthogonally" site:conwaylife.com' into Google then you get no results. I'm sure this wasn't previously the case. Is there some reason why Google would have begun to ignore parts of the forum?

[Entity Valkyrie 2]

dashes were counted in the search, but ignored in the posts.

[dvgrn]

dashes were counted in the search, but ignored in the posts.

This was a direct Google search, so I don't see how they could have gotten "ignored in the posts".

More to the point, now that the above post has been made, Google already finds it (since it contains the same text), but still can't find the thread that it's pointing to.

So clearly Google isn't crawling all the threads for some reason. Maybe the PHPBB upgrade made some kind of difference? I don't really have a good guess why Google would pay attention to this thread but not that one.

On the other hand, the problem may be the same old problem. I used to think that it was newer posts that didn't get indexed very quickly, but the above seems to be a counterexample to that. And yet the problem AforAmpere pointed out a couple of years ago still seems to be true: Google doesn't find any of the "4c/11" mentions on the OCA forums, only the ones on the Game of Life boards.

On the gripping hand, a conwaylife.com forum search can (rather painfully) find those OCA mentions now, thanks to Nathaniel allowing searches for two-letter words. "4c 11" finds a big pile of posts now, including a scattering of actual 4c/11s.

[Macbi]

Google wasn't indexing all the posts before the forum update either.