How to use the Search

Some of you may have noticed the new Search page with the latest forum update. It works a little differently from the old search page so for anyone having trouble, this post may help you.

Let's say you want to know how to do Kage's Knee () after the TFT (+). You click on the Search page and enter:

kage tft knee how

in the Keyword search terms field. You leave all the other settings at default and click on Submit. But you'll find that the results returned aren't helpful at all.

By default, the search will try to match any of your keywords. This is like a logical "OR". You're telling the search engine to return any results that match "kage" OR "tft" OR "knee" OR "how". So, for example, any posts with the word "how" or "knee" will return a result. Not really useful, right?

If you click on the Advanced search tips link, a little window appears with:

[ QUOTE ]
Use +keyword for required keywords.
Use -keyword to exclude posts with a keyword.
Use quotes around a phrase to search for a phrase.

[/ QUOTE ]

So let's revisit our search example with Kage's TFT Knee using these new tips. What we want are posts that include ALL of our keywords, which is like a logical "AND". To put it another way, each of our keywords have to be required in the results. So, we enter our search terms like this:

+kage +tft +knee +how

and click on Submit. Now we see our results are pretty much spot on!

OK, let's say you already know how to do Kage's Knee after TFT and you'd like to find all posts related to it (combos, discussions, etc), but exclude any posts asking how to do it. You can use a search term like this:

+kage +tft +knee -how

and click on Submit. You'll find that the results are filtered pretty well.

Finally, you can search on exact phrases. If you enter your search term like this:

"kage is cheap"

and click on Submit, you'll find out who uttered those exact words /versus/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Just a note when clicking on some search results, you'll find that sometimes it doesn't take you to the post you asked for. This occurs when the post you wanted was the last post of a page, and as a result, it takes you to the top of the next page. If this happens, just go back one page using the page nav links and scroll to the bottom to find your post. The exact phase search above is an example of this.

Armed with this information, you should find searching to be a little easier now. There are further filtering options for your search as well:

- search in a particular forum (default: all forums)
- search by username (default: any username)
- search by posts according to date (default: any date)

and you can change the result format:

- number of posts per page
- toggle post preview with results

Just some general searching advice - always start as specific as you can. Try starting with an exact phrase search, and if that doesn't help, try using lots of required (and excluded) keywords. Remove keywords if necessary until the results returned are of some use to you.

Another tip, especially if you're looking for character related posts, is to visit the VFDC character pages. From the home link, click on any character in the side bar menu under Virtua Fighter 4. Each character has a discussions table, which is just a filter on all the forums in versus city containing that character's name in the subject field. Click on the Pop Discussions link to open it in it's own little window which then allows you to change how many posts to show. This is like a mini character digest, a useful way of glancing through all character related posts.

Happy searching!