search engine on this forum

NeKryXe

the search engine is not giving me any results since a few days ago. i tried an insane amount of words and i even tried the exact title of a few general discussion but i never get a single result. is the search engine disabled, broken or can it be an account related problem? anyone else with the same problem?

Hippie4927

It's working for me. I did a search for "search engine" and your thread was first in the list.

NeKryXe

Hippie4927 wrote: »

It's working for me. I did a search for "search engine" and your thread was first in the list.

Ok. In that case it is definitively an account related problem.
But I also can't see anything related to it on my account settings.

The search engine has been working for many years. It was just recently that it stopped working.
Now I need to use an external search engine to search in this forum. It's really weird.

Thanks for the information.

ShawnLaRock

I have found in the past that doing a not-to-be-named G internet search gives me more accurate links to forum posts, than the actual forum search engine (although you might have to quickly look though a page or two to find an appropriate post link).

S.

the1andonlyskwex

Even when it's working "properly" I don't find the forum search very useful.

NeKryXe

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

Even when it's working "properly" I don't find the forum search very useful.

Still... I miss the search engine not being very useful. It was better than being absolutely useless.

I really can't understand how or why the search engine got blocked on my account.

I guess that my only solution might be to open a new account. I can't find anything at my end to solve this.

Reverb

Some tips that make the search feature work better on these forums:

Always open the advanced search, don’t just use the simple search bar.

Since the last forum update, the default Category listed is English (for me. It might say something different based on other user preferred languages). This is pretty useless and won’t return valid results for keyword searches most of the time. Change this to All.

Make sure “Search Subcategories” is checked. It likes to deselect by default, which is also useless.

Sometimes you’ll find that only “Discussions” is selected. This won’t find what you’re looking for most of the time. Select Comments. You can select Polls and Questions too of you want.

Then go back to the top and enter your keywords. You’ll notice a huge difference in what comes up compared to what was returned when doing that same keyword search before making these changes.

FrancisCrawford

I generally use Google rather than site-specific search. This site is no exception to that generality.

NeKryXe

Reverb wrote: »

Some tips that make the search feature work better on these forums:

Always open the advanced search, don’t just use the simple search bar.

Since the last forum update, the default Category listed is English (for me. It might say something different based on other user preferred languages). This is pretty useless and won’t return valid results for keyword searches most of the time. Change this to All.

Make sure “Search Subcategories” is checked. It likes to deselect by default, which is also useless.

Sometimes you’ll find that only “Discussions” is selected. This won’t find what you’re looking for most of the time. Select Comments. You can select Polls and Questions too of you want.

Then go back to the top and enter your keywords. You’ll notice a huge difference in what comes up compared to what was returned when doing that same keyword search before making these changes.

I'm not sure if I used it correctly but it continues to say that there are no results found.

Malkiv

Definitely just use Google for searching within sites. I haven't used a forum search function since Google supported specific site searching. I did a specific site search for the forums on Google, and your post is at the top of the list.

In the Google search bar, type

site:forums.elderscrollsonline.com

without any spaces - it all has to be one word. Then after that string, just type in what you want to search, just like in the picture. If you want to search for an exact string, you can enclose the search terms with quotes:

site:forums.elderscrollsonline.com "search engine"

This will only display result that have those exact two words in that exact order.

[Edit for spelling.]