Two Issues With Search

College Confidential Community
1

I’m trying to research past comments on specific schools in the Musical Theater area, and I’ve encountered two problems. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t know how to do the searches properly or due to actual limitations. In either case, I’d like to be able to do these searches.

Issue 1: Searching the “old forum”
I want to search the old forum’s 29 (or whatever the number is) musical theater threads to see mentions of particular schools there. But I don’t know how to search the old forum a) at all; or b) just to search these threads alone. I really need b), because,eg, if I search for “Vassar” in the whole forum I’ll get like 2 billion hits very few of which will be germane.

Issue 2: Finding the right page in a thread

In the new forum If I search for a particular school within the Musical Theater sub-forum, some of the posts that come back are within muti-page threads. These threads can be 20 pages, or more !!!

An aside: Once again, the main culprits are those forever-continuing "colleges for Musical Theater, part XXXX " threads. They go on forever and seemingly cannot be searched efficiently. I’m glad, for the sake of all future information seekers, that you provided an alternative to this fomat, but it seems some posters continue to prefer to “converse” like this. Very folksy for them, I guess, but relatively impenetrable/ inefficient for future information seekers.

Back to my point: when I do the search, instead of putting me at the page in the thread where the actual reference I’m looking for occurs, the search feature merely takes me to page 1 of the thread. To get to my reference, I’ve still get to wade through maybe 20 pages (maybe more) of posts!!!

Any suggestions to accomplish solutions for these two issues? If not, I nominate these two search issues as areas for future enhancements.

If a search cannot get to the right page in long threads due to technology limitations, then I suggest implementing limits on the number of pages a thread can have, due to limitations in an information-seeker’s ability to perform searches in these long threads. Something like 6 pages maximum, perhaps.

2

For Issue 2, you can use the Advanced Search option, select View results as “Posts” rather than “Threads”. That way you will get individual posts where your query appears.

3

In addition to displaying search results as posts, you can also search within a thread which you are viewing by clicking “Search This Thread”. Search issues were one reason we changed forum software - there’s not a good search function in the previous setup. You can still search the major topics, though.