The "advanced search" function on TT

Many users either don't know about it or can't figure out how to use it, so here's a little info.

Wiki: Forum Advanced Search

Is this how you stalk people?

Uhuh...

Why do I bother?

I often ask myself "why does he bother" too

Ive tried searching but I still cant find that one about what came before tatties.

Good work Keydeck.

Try spuds.

Don't knock it - I think Keydeck is doing a great one-man crusade.

One question though: Why isn't there a direct link in the bar at the top of the page to the advanced search function? Then you wouldn't have to click through the ordinary search function to get to it. And 90% of the users might actually find it.

Of course, that might deprive Keydeck of his mission in life though.

"Advanced" search is perhaps not the best name for it. It's actually the standard search that comes with the forum software. It only lets you search forum topics, but allows you more control over the search criteria to find specific posts or topics.

When you search via the box at the top of the forum page, you're using a TT-proprietary search engine that gives you results not only from the forum topics, but also from the wiki articles and restaurant/bar reviews.

And the proprietary one works better for most searches anyhow. Test it and see. The "advanced" search doesn't work with normal regular expressions, doesn't search for things shorter than four characters, can't recognize different forms of a word...

It's far from obvious that this is the case though.
Until somebody took the time to explain the advanced search function to me, thanks Deco, I thought that the search function was pretty useless.
It's not very user friendly to have to type in something into the search function, get no result and then have to wade through the other possibilities on offer.
Maybe there should be a direct link under the search box to the advanced search function. Maybe you could call it the " What you're really looking for function".

Thanks Keydeck.