Is something wrong with the forum’s native search function?

[theymos]

But I think that the search function still doesn't work as it should

That's unrelated to the issue DdmrDdmr brought up.

Search has a number of quirks, and I'm not going to fix them all right now. In this case, your search didn't work as expected because words appearing in a large percentage of posts are not indexed within posts at all. Currently, there are 181 unindexed words, and "bitcoin" is one of them. So if you search for "bitcoin", it will not even look for posts containing "bitcoin" in their bodies, though it will search topic subjects, and it will highlight "bitcoin" in any posts found via subject-search. As another example, if you search for "bitcoin candy", it will search for messages with [both bitcoin AND candy in their subject] OR [candy in their body], even though it will highlight both "bitcoin" and "candy" in message-bodies in the results. (Furthermore, this will exceed the result limit, so you will actually only get an arbitrary subset of the possible results.)

Next time I reindex posts, probably it would be a good idea to not have any nouns in the list of unindexed words.

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[Casdinyard]

It seems that the forum’s native search engine is returning very few results for search patters that should be flooded with results, and that normally work properly; at least for me.

i.e.
-   simple search for bitcoin -> returns 1 result (from 2010).
-   Advanced forum search for bitcoin (default settings) -> the same 1 result.
-   Advanced forum search for bitcoin (delimiting message age to last 1200 days) -> 1 single result from 2020.
-   Advanced forum search for merit (delimiting message age to last 300 days) -> 2 results.

I’ve tried other search terms such as usernames, getting 1 or 2 results at best.

I’ve also tried it on a few different browsers, cleaned cookies, and even rebooted the machine, but remain getting the said minimalist results. I don't recall this happening other than today (probably only in the past few hours).

Is this happening to everyone?

Have noticed this for a while now since last year but never really paid much attention to it cause I only ever use the search function to find people from years ago or backtrack on my old posts. I can definitely say there's something wrong as it doesn't show even the most remotest information related to what you're trying to look up, and instead puts up information that are either irrelevant to the search query, or total goofball results you wouldn't even be able to use.

Don't personally know how the devs will figure out a fix as well, as I've been told a week ago from my Notifications post in this same board there's not much we can do with an outdated system (simple machines forum) and putting the time and effort to dish out changes that require time and money could very well be considered a passion project from the sheer unfairness it will bring to those who will be tasked to work on it. So yeah, we might see changes, we might get the things we really want out of this forum but tech catches up pretty quickly and the older the forum gets, the more expensive and unfair coding these changes will be to the developers itself. Perhaps let's just thug this out until we get a revamp or something using a different forum system perhaps.

[Ambatman]

Thanks for reporting it, I think I fixed it now.

Unless I am missing something, the problem hasn't been solved yet.

I searched for the posts that have been made by myself and contain the word "bitcoin".
Before the fix, the forum search engine gave me only 1 post. Now, it's gives me 4 posts, but there should be still many more posts.

I think that's how it has always been since I joined the forum.
Most searches are few and most times not recent
That's why I opted to using search engine and just adding Bitcointalk at the end.