Forum Suggestions & User Assistance - Sharing search results

I'm noticing a few people trying to be helpful in posting a link to search results. What they are posting seems to be a reference to a session variable (or other transient entity) that is pretty useless to share.

Is there an easy way to do a search and share the search criteria (or results) such that it can be recalled later?

copy URL of search results

paste URL

example: http://www.bikeforums.net/search.php?searchid=5953983

Always the same results:

"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

ahhhh

Words have to be exact. Any variation will come up null.

^^^ Not related to the problem at hand.

Is there an easy way to do a search and share the search criteria (or results) such that it can be recalled later?

I guess just post the search terms and let the reader do her/his own search. Not very elegant but I can't think of anything better.

Oh....you could do a google search with the term site:bikeforums.net, then link to the Google results page.

http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=536692 up in the stickies^^^

^^^Again, I don't see how this applies.

Here is the use case:

user 1 performs a search using terms of his choosing and receives results where hits > 0
user 1 copies URL and posts it in a reply

user 2 selects URL from above and gets no results.

I'll bet you a beer that the programmer returns the same page/contents when there are no results as when the search itself can not be found. And they are very different errors.

An example:

I performed this search just prior to 9am today:

http://www.bikeforums.net/search.php?searchid=5969205

It used the term "search sucks" and was set to return posts (as opposed to threads). There were 92 hits returned.

Performing this search at 2:30pm returns 0 hits.

"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

An example:

I performed this search just prior to 9am today:

http://www.bikeforums.net/search.php?searchid=5969205

It used the term "search sucks" and was set to return posts (as opposed to threads). There were 92 hits returned.

Performing this search at 2:30pm returns 0 hits.

"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."

Interesting. I just got 71 hits on search posts. And 3 hits on search titles only.

Don't feel bad...I searched posts under my name and it stopped well short of my first post June 4, 2007.

Now, I didn't remember that, although I guess the June 2007 is right there on the left and I was searching for my pics to retrieve them to rebuild my backups and send an email with the original living room shot. All I found was the first pic, the eBay photo but I was tired and know it's there in one of three threads.

I'd rather that this thread didn't turn into a general rant about searching. I think there is a very useful bit of functionality that is completely missing and I would rather that the specific point is not diluted (and thus, glossed over).

I think StupidlyBrave is being misunderstood. He's not saying that the search function doesn't work. He's saying that there is no reliable way to reference a search. There's no way to save a set of search results for later reference, and there's no way to point another BF user to the results of an already-performed search.

As he's pointed out, the search function seems to use a short-lived variable (ie, the "searchid=5953983" part in "http://www.bikeforums.net/search.php?searchid=5953983"). After a certain amount of time has passed, that searchid no longer works. Clicking on the link (a link that did work at one time) no longer returns any results.


Here's my contribution, and I won't guarantee that it'll always work: http://www.bikeforums.net/search.php?query=here+is+my+search

This url will pre-populate the search terms in the search window. The user will still have to set their options and click on "Search Now". There's an alternate form I found that will run the actual search (and return a searchid), but since it's more complicated it's also more prone to silently failing in the future.

Manipulating URL strings with a query= param is way beyond most, but is otherwise very close to a solution.

Thanks for that, I owe you one :thumb:

It's certainly not as good as official software support, but it's better than the current work-arounds.

Incidentally, adding "do=process" as an additional parameter will (as of 2009-05-12, anyway) run the search. The user will be redirected to a (standard and short-lived) searchid page.

So computer scientists can reference searches, but ordinary users cannot. Not exactly a solution (although typical of computer scientists).

My amateur solution? Boycott the BF search function, which just keeps getting worse. Use Google and put in the search term site:bikeforums.net.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLC,GGLC:1969-53,GGLC:en&q=wine+bottle+site%3Abikeforums%2Enet