I've greatly enhanced the Site Search and Forum Search features.


Site and Forum Search Enhancements

More Accurate Results
The search results of the Site Search and Forum search are far more accurate now. Previously, if you were to do a search like "Music Competition", it would have returned threads with "Music" or "Competition" but it wouldn't have prioritized threads that contained both terms. Not only does it prioritize threads with both terms, it even more so prioritizes threads where the keywords are next to each other.

Highlighted Search Terms
The search results will now display the results with the search terms highlighted. This makes it easier to see the relevance of each thread. I applied this to the search of the Retro Game Room and Video Game Room as well.

More Customization
The searches now properly support full-text search operators. This allows you to really narrow down what gets returned in the results. Here are some examples:
  +Keyword = All results must contain this keyword(example)
  -Keyword = All results do not contain this keyword (example)
  "Keyword1 keyword2" = All results must contain this exact phrase (example)
  *Key* = The wildcard lets you do partial word searches (example)
  +Keyword1 +(Keyword2 Keyword3) = Include Keyword 1 and also either 2 or 3 (example)
  Key1 Key2 = A space in the search is basically "OR" (this obviously has always worked)


Site Search Enhancements

Page Directory and Page Parent Are Factored In
The Site Search will now use a page's parent name and directory name to help order the results even more accurately. So for example, if you search for Bomberman Review, the threads with 'Bomberman' in their title that are in the 'Game Reviews' forum get listed higher than the did before since the term 'Reviews' in the forum name gets considered for the search. Before this update, a search like this may not have returned any reviews since a thread title rarely has that term in it.

Keep in mind that in order to keep things flowing in an organized way, the search results will always be in alphabetical order first based on page directory, then by page parent, and then by page title. So with the above Bomberman Review search example, the actual "Game Reviews" are at the bottom of the page because those pages belong to a directory whose name doesn't come first when compared to the other directory names.

Search Box Keeps Search Term
I also made it so that when you are searching for something, no matter what part of the site, the search term stays in that search box within the left Navigation column. This wasn't the case before.