Happier Abroad Forum Community

Hi all,
Per odbo's suggestion, I changed the search box at the top of the forum to a better one. The original one was highly flawed in that if you typed more than one word in the search field, it would only do a search for the first word and ignore all the words after that. I have no idea why they made it like that, but it was totally inefficient, since many searches involve multiple words, not just one.

So anyway, I replaced it with a custom Google search box (the same one used on the home page) that searches this entire site (not just this forum) and brings up the results on one Google style page. This Google search box, fortunately, will search for ALL the words you type in, not just the first one like the other did. So it's much more effective and functional.

Anyhow, try it out. You will find it at the top of the forum. I'm sure it will work much better in finding older topics and questions.

Regards,
Winston

Update:

After we switched to the new forum, the search box at the top that came with the template sucked. I couldn't find a lot of search terms. And I could not build a search index in the admin panel either because building that index put too much of a load on our server that caused the panel to fail. So we couldn't even generate a proper search index.

So I put the Google search box back at the top since it worked much better. You can use it now to find topics or keywords.

Update:

I moved the Google search box one line down from the top right corner of the header. In its place I put the mailing list sign up box. If you haven't signed up for the mailing list yet, simply enter your email in it and hit Subscribe to sign up.

Note: It appears that the Google search box embedded above cannot find all topics in the forum. It looks like it can find maybe 90 percent of topics. So if you know a topic exists but can't find it using the Google search box at the top, then go to Google's main site and enter in this:

site:www.happierabroad.com search terms

In place of "search terms" enter the terms you want to search for. That way, the "site:www.happierabroad.com" part will have Google search only on HappierAbroad.com for your search terms.

Update:

The new Google search box at the top of this forum works better. It will bring up the search results below the header in a big window, rather than taking you to a totally different screen off the forum. It looks a lot more smooth. Try it out and enter some search terms. It's on the top right.

I tried it out - it seems to work great.

Excellent functionality addition! Many thanks!

Why do I see two search boxes located relatively close to each other? (top right corner). Do I detect duplicity here?

TruthSeeker wrote: ↑

November 23rd, 2017, 7:12 am

Why do I see two search boxes located relatively close to each other? (top right corner). Do I detect duplicity here?

Sorry I forgot to mention that. The search box on the top right in the blue header is the default search engine, using the index database of the forum. Next to it you will see a flower petal which takes you to the advance search screen. The search below that is the one by Google.

If one is better than the other, why not eliminate the inferior?

It doesn't look good having two search boxes. As you said, google is better so go with that.

TruthSeeker wrote: ↑

November 23rd, 2017, 6:29 pm

If one is better than the other, why not eliminate the inferior?

It doesn't look good having two search boxes. As you said, google is better so go with that.

Because i wanna leave both up so people have a choice which one they wanna use. They are different. One is not necessarily better. Plus the google search box does not find all the threads here. I dont know why. And no one on the google product forums knows why either. Strangely no one else has brought this problem up to their attention except me. Strange. So sometimes i gotta use the default search box too. Also the default search box has an advanced search feature that narrows down the search. Click on the settings icon next to it and you'll see.