How to Search for B&S

[Balladeer]

I tried searching for all posts that reference B&S saxophones. No results were ever found. Yet, we know that there are posts about B&S saxes here. My theory is that the ampersand '&' character is intrepetted as something else by the search engine.

Please tell me how to search for B&S.

[Pete]

The amperstand ("&") is definitely interepreted as a Boolean operator for search engines -- it's as if you're typing in "B*S". You get so many hits, the search engine stops searching after a couple of minutes (at least it does for me).

I don't know why a specific search, such as (exactly the following) "B&S" doesn't work. This may be either a bug in the search engine or the search engine is actually looking for (exactly the following) "B&S" and there's no posts that contain (exactly the following) "B&S".

There are updates available to the phpBB forum, but MyForums.net, SOTW's current forum host, has not implemented these upgrades and ignores me when I ask when they're planning on upgrading (based on their quick response to all the other problems I've had them look at, I'd say that this is a conflict between their support team and management).

I'll try to post in the phpBB help forum later today and see what they have to say.

[Mike Ruhl]

Well, you can search for things codera and medusa, but I'm sure you've thought of that. I'll play with this and see if I can't figger it out. After all, I am a systems analyst! :wink:

[Mike Ruhl]

It appears this system's search only supports a subset of the commonly-used Boolean operators. While it recognizes & as an operator, it does not recognize ? as a wildcard character. I tried several other typical Boolean tricks, to no avail.

Looks like the best option is to search for b*s, then use control-f to do a find on b&s on the resulting page. Of course, that will only catch it if it appears in the title of a thread.

fyi, here's a web page with a good summary of Boolean operators: http://www.em.doe.gov/rapic/6summary.html

[Pete]

Just an update: searching for "B&S" is still a problem, even in vBulletin. I still recommend that y'all do what meruhl suggests or a variation thereof.