I've had trouble searching this forum.

Example: I'm trying to search for posts with "pvr.pl" in it.

I find 700 matches when using the "any terms" and also the "all terms" options. What's happening is it's finding posts with "pvr" only in them. I say this because when I search each page of the post for "pvr.pl" nothing is found.

If I put it in quotes, it finds 700 posts as well.

Google has no trouble finding posts with pvr.pl in it: search:
site:mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2 pvr.pl finds 19 hits on this website.

The forum must be set up incorrectly?

no it's not setup incorrectly it is just the way the phpbb developers decided to implement searching. It is very privative compared to google. It does work well for most searches you would need though just try to find two somewhat unique words and search for all terms. If you want to know more about the limitations of the search function and the reasons behind it you can go look at the phpbb site.

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Xsecrets

Putting single or double quotes around that gets exactly 4 hits... For cases when you need to get more sophisticated you can also use the google site: option like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amysettopbox.tv+pvr.pl&btnG=Google+Search

When I put single or double quotes around it, I get 701 hits (using either "any" or "all" terms as options)
'pvr.pl'
"pvr.pl"
I did use google in the end, as it at least narrowed the numbers down - and gave valid results, too. But I'm guessing if there's a newish post, google may not list it for a while.

I did check some other phpbb forums and see they have the same search problems.

Weird... I got very different results last night (now I get 711). All of which looked dead on...

like I said it was a design decision, and there are very good reasons for it if you want to know what they are go search the forums at the official phpbb site. has to do with search speed vs processing power. A single box at someones house has limited power whereas googles several hundred thousand server cluster has plenty of processing power.

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Xsecrets

The best solution would be having phpbb support some sort of full text indexing, but hey, it's free, so...

-brendan

that's exactly the decision they made not to have full text indexing and they defend their position. far too many people run this bb on less than stellar machines and that would not be possible with full text indexing. It greatly increases the disk space and processor utilization to have full text indexing.

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Xsecrets

It coulda been a software switch then. I find searching on phpbb forums very frustrating. If Cecil had the time he could hack in a google search block here and have it default to searching this site.

You're assuming I know how and I have an issue with the default search.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

actually you can implement a more thorough search, it still won't rival google, but better, but it comes at a big cost in overhead, and like I said the search the way it is works for most people. In my opinion the only thing that is horribly broken with it is that it does not default to all words, as I have to think really hard to imagine a situation where you would want any words which is the default.

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Xsecrets

Nah, I didn't assume anything Cesman, just didn't word that post right.