Searching the Old Forum Posts

[KML]

UPDATE: Please scroll down and read the latest post on this thread for an update.

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Hello everyone,

Many of you may have wondered how to search the old forum now that they are just static web pages without the search function built in. You may have noticed that some of the old posts turn up on Google search results but coverage has been spotty since we made the move to the new forum. I don't fully understand the indexing habits of Google, but I believe that today I have successfully uploaded an XML "sitemap" to Google's "search console" system which hopefully will allow for better search access of old posts.

So how do you use Google to search the old forum? Open Google.com and enter:

site:http://warsailors.com/forum/archive/forum/ [Your Search Terms]

For example, let us say I want to search the old forum for "Olaf Bergh." Then I would go to google.com and enter:

site:http://warsailors.com/forum/archive/forum/ "Olaf Bergh"

For me that yields 33 results. I used the quotation marks here in order to search for that exact phrase. If you want to search for a single word or don't care if it is an exact phrase, you can leave the quotes off. For example:

site:http://warsailors.com/forum/archive/forum/ Manila

yields 5 results for me.

I can't guarantee that every single old posting is in the index.

Best,

Konrad M Lawson

[t-geronimo]

Great work. Many thanks!!

[Siri]

Darius, I just made a big boo boo, I thought I had responded to your post, where you said you had been waiting for a way to search the old forums, but instead I deleted both my response and your post! I’m so sorry, no idea how it happened, and no idea how to get it back. All I can do is apologize and try to avoid the same kind of mistake in the future.

What I said in my response was, if you go back to my son's other pinned comment “where are all the old forum posts”, you’ll see an explanation for why this couldn’t be done sooner - just to clarify.

[Darius]

I only wrote "thank you".


Regards

Darius

[Siri]

You also wrote something about you’ve been waiting to be able to search the forums, and I just wanted to clarify why it had taken so long. But either way, I feel awful that I deleted both our posts in one sweep. I know how it happened now but it would be too hard to explain. It’s the second time I’ve done that. I think I’m getting too old for new technology.

[KML]

Hello everyone, for the convenience of anyone who wants to easily search the old Ship Forum (2001-2019), I have now added a custom Google Search feature here:

http://warsailors.com/forum/

Also, anyone clicking on the search button in any of the archived posts will also get access to an updated old search page here:

http://warsailors.com/forum/archive/for ... php-1.html

Note: This custom search engine has limits. It may show a limited total number of results (100 hits) and supports only 100 searches per day (so if there are a lot searches by visitors it will stop working for the day). If you want to get more results, as mentioned above you can still use google.com directly. Go to google.com and include "site:http://warsailors.com/forum/archive/forum/" together with your search keywords. That will limit the search to the old archive of the forum.

[Darius]

Thank you

Regards

Darius