Search & Advanced search

[nomko]

Hi,

IMHO the search option doesn't work the way it should be. As example, if I want to search on a specific HP laptop (i.e.: HP DV7) and I specify as keyword HP dv7, the search result is:

The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: hp dv7.
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.

The use of wildcards can help, but not when searching for specific things. Or am I doing something here? The (advanced) search page of the English Ubuntuforum (http://ubuntuforums.org/search.php?s=54404ee837bba7b5390126bfd3879a76?search_type=1) has more options to get a better search result. Can this be implemented on the Linux Mint forum? I think that the search page will be more of an assistance with that layout/option than it is on this moment.

[xenopeek]

Ubuntu forum uses vBulletin. Linux Mint forum uses phpBB. The search function on the Linux Mint forum is the one phpBB offers. It's pretty useless, but it's all we get on phpBB. Perhaps some day Linux Mint forums will migrate to other forum software, but it's not currently on the table that I know of.

Just use your Internet search engine if you need to find specific information. Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, Google, and others all support the basic syntax to search only on one domain; "site:linuxmint.com" (or for even more specific, but missing out for example on blog posts that might be relevant, "site:forums.linuxmint.com").

So, for your example you'd search for: HP DV7 site:linuxmint.com

That turns up relevant matches, and you can further narrow down the matches using the features your Internet search engine of choice has.

[nomko]

thanks for the explanation Vincent!

[xenopeek]

I'm sure I've posted this before, though even my own trick won't let me find it right now (I'm not using the right keywords I guess), but you can also create your own search plugin. For example, I have a search plugin that uses Google to search all the Linux Mint websites.

If you want it, you can add it easily. Open your file manager and show hidden files (press Ctrl+H usually, or find the option for it in your file manager's menu). Go to the .mozilla folder in your home folder, to the firefox folder, to the folder ending in ".default", and finally to the searchplugins folder (and if it isn't there, create it first and then go into it). Extract the file google_linuxmint.xml from the attached file in this post to that folder.

google_linuxmint.zip

Now if you restart Firefox, you will find that if you click the down arrow icon in your search bar you can select "Linux Mint (Google)". If you then enter something to search for, it will search all the websites on linuxmint.com and also github.com/linuxmint (the Linux Mint projects on GitHub). Not many other search engines can search two domains, which is why I'm using Google.

If you value your privacy, I have the same also available for DuckDuckGo though that one only searches linuxmint.com and not also github.com/linuxmint (though that is probably not an issue for most users).

ddg_linuxmint.zip

It's easy enough to create similar search plugins yourself for other search engines, or edit the ones I've attached (if for example you only want to search forums.linuxmint.com). You can do so with any text editor. The file format is described here: http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1