Why is the vbulletin search feature such garbage?
 

I searched for "eminem" trying to find the thread by sologirlcontent and it fails to find it and gives me a bunch of older shit (even if I type it in caps).

It's always been like this, there's online tutorials made by total novices with better search coding examples than this. WTF?

because its an open source software..

Not even close to an excuse. Even the most basic search query is better than the results this shit puts up.

Maybe it's because of the way GFY handles the database?

I have always wondered why the search function is so imperfect and not up to date. There are many other forums with more posts that have a better search functionality and there is no reason GFY shouldn't work well either.

Honestly, I think it has more to do with you than VB search feature.

Search by the correct username and keywords :2 cents:

Vbulletin search sucks. There is at least one third party search system available for big boards like GFY, avixo or something, previously searchlight, running on the sphinx platform. Unfortunately it is only available for vb 3.8 though. Really, vbulletin should just purchase the company because it shits all over anything they have ever produced in that field.

wrong, what he says is right. Alot of times old threads come up and newer ones get ignored

Yeah I have actually noticed this too, it's either older threads or completely unrelated ones that have little to nothing to do with what your trying to find. Can get frustrating.

same problems. Search for 'internext' and you can't find the recent topics.

The DB has over 16 million posts in the main forum. 99% of vbulletin sites don't have even a tiny fraction of the data and traffic GFY has. Can you imagine how many fulltext searches are being done against a db of 16 million+ rows?

Have you looked at the vbulletin source related to the search? Frankly it's not bad at all. The bottleneck is MySQL or more accurately the hardware it's running on. Personally if GFY were mine mysql would be running on a load balanced cluster.