Tips on Searching

[upchurchmr]

I was trying to search for anything on a "3M Trimaran" which was popular some years ago.

I can only get a search for 3M and trimaran separately. As you can imagine I get lots of returns for trimaran, which is not useful.

How can I search for a phrase. I tried single quotes and an underscore to connect the words - same result.

Thanks

Marc

[Boat Design Net Moderator]

What you are seeing is actually a different limitation of the internal search which is a mysql search minimum word length.

If you phrase search using quotes with words of 4 characters or more, you'll find that "phrase search" does work.

You can also use a combination of a "phrase search" and a wildcard * to search for a keyphrase with or without a space. "3M*Trimaran"

However, for short words alone, like 3M, or for 'smarter match' non-contiguous keyword phrase searching, the google search is a better tool.
The google search option was added to the bottom of the search dropdown menu as in some situations such as this one, it is more powerful than the internal forum search.