vrracing

iTrader: (1)

I personally find the built in forum search frustrating. I seem to get a high noise to single ratio. The built in forums seem to only support "OR" between keywords and I think it strips quotation marks as well.

So I usually use Google to search the forum and thought others might find how I do that useful.

USING THE FORUM SEARCH

So, in this example I want to search for how to do a fuel pump rewire on a 2nd gen. So if I do that with forum search I'll use Advanced Search with the term "fuel pump rewire" and I'll specify the 2nd Gen sub-forums to limit the search. I dont bother limiting the search to topic titles because titles are usually "Help!", "I need help NOW!" or "WTF"

Here are the results...



In that first dozen "most relevant" set of results I dont see anything this is likely to show me how to rewire the fuel pump.

Now, lets see what we can do with Google...

USING GOOGLE SEARCH IN THE FORUMS

Google has a lot of power but with a few simple items in your search parameters you can get really good results.

Specifically, I want to point Google at rx7club.com. To do that I add "site:rx7club.com" to my search string.

Second, I want to limit my search to FCs as I suspect that FD fuel pump rewiring tips will make me sad. RX7Club.com puts breadcrumbs (ie, RX7Club.com > Generation Specific > 2nd Generation Specific (1986-1992)) at the top of each topic. So if we add "2nd Generation Specific (1986-1992)" to our search criteria it will limit the search to items in the FC forums.

So at the Google home page enter:

fuel pump rewire "2nd Generation Specific (1986-1992)" site:rx7club.com

You'll get:



As you can see, these are very promising results!

Good luck and I hope you find this useful.

vrracing

iTrader: (1)

How about adding your RX7Club 2nd Gen search to your Firefox or IE7 search bar? Then you dont even have to be at the site to search it and you dont have to put in all the complicated search definition!

I defined a Search Engine so you can type a search term in your browser's search bar and get results just from RX7Club.com's Second Generation forum. In Firefox it will look like this...



I went ahead and defined search engines for the FB, FC and FD forums. To install them just click the appropriate link below and then click on the blue letter I (as in "install") to the left of the search engine name

• RX7Club FB
• RX7Club FC
• RX7Club FD

Cool, huh?

The moderators can take search engines and then make them available to everyone should they so choose. There are instructions for that here.

Hope you find this useful.

Jim

PS, I tested these on Firefox 3 and they all worked fine. They should also work with IE7.

So now there is no excuse for not searching first!

vrracing

iTrader: (1)

Chrome should work as it supports the OpenSearch standard.

I installed the latest Opera and when I click the links the site (not Opera) displays a message that the search engine definitions are only supported by IE and Firefox. Opera does not appear to support OpenSearch and instead you have to use their proprietary dialog box to define a search. I looked at the help and some pages on it and it's too complicated and poorly documented for me to mess with it. Maybe an Opera aficionado will take a shot.

Safari does not yet support OpenSearch either.