Searching Forums - Optimization!

I have seen this question asked a few times, and was suggested I make a guide for it. Never know who this might help! I didn't know these features existed up until recently.

Most of us know, searching the forums for information is so useful, but it can be extremely tedious wading through different posts that highlight the words you might be looking for, but not really showing you what you are really really after.

Luckily for us, the torn wiki gives us different ways to narrow down our searches!


The search engine is powered by Sphinx, looking for keywords that are a maximum of 5 words apart at most. A few punctuations can be used to enhance your search:

• Hyphen/Minus (-) - find posts that do not contain the following word.
  • list safe -crime doesn't contain "crime"
• Equal Sign (=) - find posts where the following word is exactly this (no plural forms).
  • list safe =crime contains exactly "crime"
• Circumflex Accent (^) - find posts that begin with the following word
  • list ^beginning crimes begins with "beginning"
• Dollar Sign ($) - find posts that end with the preceding word
  • list ending$ crimes ends with "ending"
• Double Less-Than Sign (<<) - find posts with the preceding word preceding the following word
• one << four << two the word "one" must come before "four", and "four" must come before "two"

***To also further your searches, you can also select the forum where the info most likely will be hiding. Typically I search the Questions and Answers thread (most of the info I’m after has already been asked), but depending on the type of question, I try to select the most appropriate forum to pull from.



Please note, I have not tried this out much myself. Simply saw it posted in the QnA forum, and was told I should share it with everyone else. Feel free to report your findings if you play around with these enhancements!

https://wiki.torn.com/wiki/Forums#Forum_Search < Where I found the info of course. :)

Nice guide - should help make forum searching more accessible for the masses. :)

nice kelsie

There's also the thing (browser only) where u can change the number after the = sign on the link when searching keywords to decrease the amount of results that come up, pretty neat

+1 tho nice

That’s good to know! I spend a lot of my time on my phone, so I don’t experience all that stuff definitely. Appreciate it!

YoUr In Pt DiSgUsTiNg TrAsH




^^^^^^^^^^ Joke ^^^^^^^^
seriously tho great guide R+

Still want phrase search but the commands do help somewhat. Thanks for sharing these tips.

will try a few of these rn
thanks

Great guide, thank you! :)

Please post successes and failures in using these shortcuts so we can determine whether this works as intended.

Yes ^^ absolutely this!

Double Less-Than Sign (<<) DOES NOT WORK
The symbols need to be switched around. Use the greater-than sign. Include a space between the word and symbol. (>>). Not sure if this was an error from Torn Devs because on Sphinx's resource page, they use (<<) to arrange search results. (Sphinx is the open source tool used by Torn btw). When using this command, ex: one >> four >> two, it would highlight these words in order BUT most of the time, other words would be between the words "one," "four," and "two."

lol nvm, it doesn't work at all. (<<) would just show the first word. Ex: You type word1 << word2 << word3. Your search result would just be word1. Switching it around to (>>) would do nothing. Torn search would just ignore it.

Specific First/Last Word
When using the (^) or ($) to find the first/last word of a post, it would include the entire word.
For example, searching: ^The. It would show results with "The" in front of the post like "They," "Them", and "These." To combat this, just put an equal sign in front of the search command. Ex: =^Word and =Word$.

Unfortunately, we cannot search exact phrases with quotation marks. Ex: "Free Item Giveaway." This feature is on the Sphinx's resource page. Torn searches ignores most symbols/punctuation marks.

Sphinx Search Query Syntax

Those are some helpful findings. It is a real shame that exact search doesn't work yet.

Has anyone tested other Sphinx search operators that weren't listed in the OP?

Needed this terribly. Thank you for your dedication.

Can we get this added below the search boxes. So frustrating to try "Safe crimes" in the search, but each word is independent.

Also for my example would is now be =safe crimes or =safe =crimes?

weird that i have been following this but i seem to be unable to find the topic i want.

either it doesnt exist or graved. but i remember reading it somewhere.

nice guide though

its 2022, this search engine feels more like 1990.

In 2008 this would have felt like a 1990s search engine. Now it feels like an 1880s search engine (a list of every book in a library, except at least that would be sorted into vaguely relevant groups) lmao.

Honestly not sure why it hasn't ever been updated, probably someone who benefits from people not being able to easily find information about a game. Or just a lazy game director.