[Brian Livingston]

We recently replaced the default search engine that comes with Invision Power Board 3.0 — the software platform that runs the Lounge — with the more powerful Sphinx search engine, an open-source project.

To get the most out of our new search engine, click the Advanced link near the Search box in the upper-left corner of the Lounge Lobby page (and many other pages) or click the following URL:

Lounge.WindowsSecrets.com/index.php?app=core&module=search

The benefits of using Sphinx are apparent. The old, default search engine did not consider a query like microsoft excel to mean microsoft AND excel, as Google and most other search engines do today. Instead, the old software considered the query to mean microsoft OR excel. This matched many irrelevant documents. Sphinx treats queries like this the same way Google does, with an implied AND between terms.

Several tricks that other search engines use are also supported by Sphinx. In the "Find words" field, the following operators are supported:

microsoft excel ......... matches microsoft AND excel
microsoft | excel ....... matches microsoft OR excel
"microsoft excel" ...... matches the exact phrase
microsoft –excel ....... matches microsoft but NOT excel

For a complete list of the search engine's options, see the software's syntax documentation.

However, several known issues with Sphinx remain. IP.Board 3 does not currently support certain Sphinx functions that the company admits should be working but are not. For a list of some known issues, please see http://bro.ws/772387L .

Please don't reply to this thread, which is simply an announcement. If you find a bug in the search engine other than one of the known issues, please post a reply in http://bro.ws/772387L or use the "Contact an administrator" link at the bottom of the page to let us know. Thanks!