Search function is broken

[AnneInMpls]

Well, it's not "broken" as in there's a recent bug. But the search function is unusable as currently designed. The sloppy matching feature means that it's difficult-to-impossible to find anything.

Here's today's example: I want to search the Midwest board for a restaurant called "Los Andes". I know that quotes don't work, so I can't enter the entire name. Instead, I enter "andes", which I believe is specific enough to find any mentions of the restaurant.

Here's what I get: ALL THREADS CONTAINING THE WORD "AND". That's 2,924 results. If any of these thread mention "Los Andes", I'll never know. Life is just too short.

This is a dramatic demonstration of the problem, but it happens all the time. Once, I tried to find threads about the east-coast chain "Friendly's", but got everything mentioning "friend" and "friends". (Never did find anything about Friendly's.) Another time, I was searching a board for the term "organic", and got "organize", "organized", "organizing", and "organization".

Who in their right mind would want this feature in a search??? Not me.

My workaround is to leave chow.com to do a search on google or yahoo. But once I leave, I usually don't return for the day, because I find other sites that are easier to use. I hope your advertisers are OK with the fact that the poor search function is reducing their ad hits.

Anne

[Jacquilynne]

Hi, Anne,

I was able to get pretty good results for Los Andes using this search:

http://chowhound.chow.com/search?sear...

I used quotes though, to get those results. In what way are they not working for you?

[AnneInMpls]

Finally got back to this post (I haven't had much online time recently). Thanks for the quick reply, Jacqulynne!

Sure enough, quotes seem to work now - I had given up on using them in the past - but this search example still demonstrates the problem: Most of the hits are on "lo and (behold)" instead of "los andes". Luckily, there are only 15 hits, so I can actually find what I'm looking for - in this instance.

My main comment still stands - the inexact/approximate matching makes the search function unusable, unless one is lucky enough to be searching for a unique word.

As an example, here's my attempt (using quotes) to find "Friendly's" restaurants on the east coast. The results include "friend", "friends", "friend's", "friends'", and "friendly". Because these words occur so often in so many posts, I can't tell if there are any posts about Friendly's.

http://chowhound.chow.com/search?sear...

Is there a way to search for an exact word or phrase, without the fuzzy matching? If not, the search function is so unusable that I would call it broken.

Thanks,
Anne