I recommend that a similar search system to 'google' be implemented. So that quotes may be used to match exact phrases or '-' and '+' to exclude/include any words. Unless I have missed something it is very hard to narrow a search.
Provided that you know how mySQL queries work, you can accomplish this by using "AND" or "OR". The Gentoo Forum search engine is lacking, and that is more or less a result of the phpBB software we run. It would be way too hard to maintain an updated search engine as phpBB evolves on its own. Another short comming I'd like to point out is the inability to search for words less then 3 characters. ie: searching for "su" will return nothing.
I'd imagine that an updated search function is slated in phpbb 2.1/2.2. I don't have the time or the reasources to write an updated function.
In addition to dropping words shorter than three letters, it also drops periods (so, for example, a search for 'php5.1' appears to parse this as 'php5' and '1', and will thus drop the '1' (since it is a word of less than three characters); on the other hand, a search for 'php5.000', when it returns, shows a search string of 'php5' and '000'. I realize (at least some of) the problems involved in fixing this, but JEEZ, put up a warning or something on the forums, so that people can write posts that include words like "php51" rather than "php5.1" since it is litterally impossible to search for such a term. An explanation of how not to use the forum search engine and suggestions for how to make one's posts visible to the search engine would make its even more useful than it already is, and wouldn't require anything more than a few minutes of time of someone who knows the problems (i.e. no one has to write any code). I'll let this sit here for a while, and if it doesn't get a response, I'll post it as a new bug (not sure if anyone reads resolved bugs to try to fix them).
