Is it possible to search for a phrase?

[Analog Kid]

I was looking for a previous post by a specific user, and wanted to search on a phrase rather than a set of possible keywords. I put the phrase in quotes thusly: “search phrase”. The search engine completely ignored the quotes, as best I can tell, and seems to be giving results with one or the other word but not the phrase.

Is there a syntax to search for a phrase?

 

[Darth.Titan]

• I picked a random post in a random thread from the forums and selected and copied a specific sentence.
• After clicking the search icon I clicked the 'Advanced Search' link and pasted in that specific sentence into the 'Keywords' field in double quotes.
• The search results found the random post in the random thread, and the search query for the results definitely included the quotes.
• An additional test worked the same way using just the regular search and not clicking through to 'Advanced'.

 

[Analog Kid]

• I picked a random post in a random thread from the forums and selected and copied a specific sentence.
• After clicking the search icon I clicked the 'Advanced Search' link and pasted in that specific sentence into the 'Keywords' field in double quotes.
• The search results found the random post in the random thread, and the search query for the results definitely included the quotes.
• An additional test worked the same way using just the regular search and not clicking through to 'Advanced'.

Hmmm…. Maybe the problem is that I’m searching for a phrase of two 3-letter words? If I search for posts I’ve made with the phrase “not fun”, for example, I get pages of results but they don’t seem to include both words of the phrase together. I’ll try again after I post this and see if the results change.

edit: this post is at the top of the results now, if I’m careful not to capitalize “not”, but then there are a ton of results without the phrase before this post shows up on the the second page of results:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...mblem-heroes-an-outlier.2038455/post-24426948

I'm pretty sure the quotes aren't doing anything, and this post gets a high rank because of it's recency. You're succeeding with a full sentence because of the larger number of words.

 

[Weaselboy]

I don't think you are doing anything wrong. I too find the built in search does not work well with short phrases.

I use the below Google search for specific phrases and it works well.

"your phrase" site:forums.macrumors.com

 

[arn]

Xenforo is supposed to support quotes but doesn’t seem to. Let me ask around.

 

[arn]

So looking into this. I do think phrase search works to some degree, in that it prioritizes it, but will also list non phrases.

The problem might come from certain words are considered stop words and are not included in the index. In your case "not" is not an available search term.

If you search for "pineapple fun" with quotes, there are no results. (or weren't when I typed this). But if you type pineapple fun without quotes, it does list some results.