Why doesn't the Search function show me what I ask for?

Two Places to Search
For most quick searches the search box located in the header area in the upper right corner of the page will usually give what you need:





But if you need to be a bit more selective or restrictive (for example you're getting too many irrelevant results), then click on the Search option in the navigation bar:





This will offer a similar search box which can be used the same way as the other one, or, you can click on the Advanced Search link at he bottom which opens up a few more filter options for you.

How it Works...or, Doesn't!
The built in Search function in our forum is far from the best.
And unfortunately, we're stuck with it until the Forumotion developers improve on it. At present it relies on Google's search engine.

In essence the problem when entering a search term, is that it only searches the Topic and Post Title. It does not search the post content! Not too helpful.

Even worse, it only searches on one word, the first one entered, and not the phrase!
In other words it's only set up to search key words, and a keyword in these forums has to be a minimum of 4 letters long. (For example, the keyword "the" will not show any results.)

Remember, Search will only look at the Titles for the keywords. So it's a good idea to get into the habit of writing a clear topic title when creating a new thread so it can easily be found later on.

This site is growing daily and there is a ton of useful info that you need. But it's buried here, somewhere! The frustration is in trying to find it. Here are a couple of more ideas to try:

KEYWORDS CLOUD
You may find the Keywords cloud in the widget column on the right side of the page useful. It's located in the slide out widget column on the right side and is a good place to check for commonly referenced terms, like a Spectrum guitar for example. If the widget column is closed, click on the blue chevron at the top right of the page to open it. (click here for more info).

It references the most often looked at areas of the site and changes constantly, but the model or topic you're looking for may already be showing a link there.

USING GOOGLE
Almost all web sites on the internet are regularly surveyed by "bots" (automated search robots, sometimes called spiders). These crawl all over our site and index everything. Much more thorough than our miserable built in search function.

I just came across a very powerful Google command which can access all this info very quickly:

• open Google
  
• in the search bar type site:forum.westoneguitars.net followed by your search term
  

For example, as of this writing, site:forum.westoneguitars.net spectrum st yields a staggering 1,480 references!!
Very impressive, but kind of unusable unless you have lots of time on your hands to wade through it all. In this case Google will give you every post that mentions spectrum and/or st, but the terms may not necessarily relate to each other. But the good news is that you can refine the search just as you normally would in Google. So, adding quotation marks will give you specific references with that exact wording.

Example: site:forum.westoneguitars.net "white spectrum st" yields 7 references. Much better. (dropping the quotation marks gives 475 hits, still too many to use)

If you're a regular Google searcher you'll be familiar with all the ways of customizing it to get what you need. If you're not, check out the Google search directions for more info.