Aboyt the forum

[turboscrew]

I put this here, because I couldn't find a subforum or anything for this forum itself.
(Maybe there should be some site-related subforum?)

Why is there the annoying search limitation:

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: nemo.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 5 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

Pretty many names in Linux are short. Notice: EACH word in searc must be at least 5 characters.

The same problem with "smb.conf":

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: smb conf.
You must specify at least one word to search for. Each word must consist of at least 5 characters and must not contain more than 14 characters excluding wildcards.

[catweazel]

Yes, it's a pain, but you can get what you need with google:

Code: Select all

<search terms> site:forums.linuxmint.com

[xenopeek]

The forum search function is rather limited performance wise. This is no Google server farm So there are some constraints in place to ensure the forum isn't dragged to a halt from those kind of searches. Agreed, it isn't ideal and it is something that we'd want to improve with a future forum software version.

For such searches you may instead use an Internet search engine, like DuckDuckGo, Yahoo!, or Google. All these support restricting results of your search to a domain. You can do so by adding the keyword "site:linuxmint.com" to your search.

For example, here are the search results on DDG when searching for "smb.conf site:linuxmint.com": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=smb.conf+site%3Alinuxmint.com

Again, not ideal--but I generally search that way because I can use my Internet search engine's additional functions like restricting my search to a certain time period. When looking for a solution to some problem, I usually restrict results to the past 12 months. Anything older is much more likely to be not immediately useful.

[anandrkris]

Below are links of custom search engines that help in searching linux related topics. You could search here and even filter for Mint.
http://home.windstream.net/joelwest/
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=01760 ... _owgx6xyi0
I have them bookmarked.

[altscribe]

One expects there would be near total agreement that Linux Mint LMDE and "regular" Ubuntu based Linux Mint are two different products with differing specifics about the best technical solutions to problems.

The problem I keep encountering is when I need to search for a specific topic or problem and type in, for example: LMDE nvidia into the "Advanced search" input field at the top right corner of the page when in the LMDE Forum area.

Results returned are not as specified, but pertain to ALL versions of Linux Mint, and simply due to numeric reality, and wind up being 3:1 or 4:1 responses about versions of Linux Mint other than LMDE. Certainly there are many similarities between Debian and Ubuntu, but there are also many important differences, particularly in addressing hardware and interfacial issues.

Let me suggest an improvement in the search algorithms such that if a search term contains a specific Linux Mint Version as the first term of the search term that the results be confined to that version ONLY. Results matching the secondary search term, but not matching the first, the primary, search term should come up after "hits" that are a 100% match, and be labeled accordingly. Currently, results are mixed randomly, ignoring the primary search term. After spending a large part of my professional life designing and testing search algorithms I can say that this is not difficult, and is a feature on many search engines. I will be happy to fix this for everyone, provided the search algorithms are in one of the computer languages that I know. Thanks!