New feature - Enhanced Search

I've just enabled Enhanced Search functionality on the forums which uses an external search server (Elasticsearch) to provide better indexing of content on the site.

The search engine provides higher performance and more flexibility in search terms.

An immediate impact you'll see is that you can now search for short terms. Previously, allowing words shorter than 4 characters caused the size of the database to grow exponentially, so you could search for the term "asic", but not the term "ato".

With the new search engine, you can search for TLAs to your heart's content - indeed there is no minimum search length at all.

Note that there are some "stop" words which are too common and won't be indexed (don't bother trying to search for the word "and"!)

The search engine also adds "stemming" capability, which means that it is smart enough to include results that are based on the same root of the word you searched for. For example, a search for the word "tests" will automatically match results for "test", "testing", "tested", and other similar words.

You can also use modifiers such as the NOT operator adding a hyphen "-" to exclude terms, so a search for "ato -mytax" will return posts which contain the word "ato" but not those which also contain the word "mytax".

Similarly, you can use the OR operator by adding a vertical bar "|" between search terms to return posts which contain either one term or the other. For example, "abn | acn" will return posts which contain either the term abn or acn (or both).

You can also quote a string to search for a specific phrase, for example you can search for posts which contain the exact phrase "self managed super fund".

Hopefully you'll find the search engine far more useful now.

I've also enabled the enhanced search over on Somersoft, if you are trawling through the archives there for specific information.

 

No, I'm not sure that works.

Searching for "Carlingford Rd" should return a fairly small set of results though.