Thanks for your inquiry regarding the functionality of the search function. We agree with your comments and would like to see the software provider upgrade this feature to allow "search within", "exact phrase", and other boolean terms. At present this is beyond the control of 420 Magazine, but we can help with a few tips and tricks that might make searching the site easier.
The 420 Magazine search feature is most powerful when you know the user, forum, and tag from the post you are looking for. Any one of these or a combination of three will narrow the results and usually return the desired post immediately.
If you know only the user, we suggest you try the "find more posts by user" feature from either the users control panel page or the users drop down box. This technique returns a quick display of 20+ posts per page.
if you only know a specific phrase, or a specific term that is not being returned as a tag, then a boolean search is probably called for. Here, we suggest the use of google's "search within a site or domain" feature.
If you are looking for an article where you remember the exact phrase, use quotation marks around it "what is a phenotype". This restricts the search to only the specific phrase.
If you know multiple words in the post just list them all, knowing that only posts containing every word will be returned
If you think you know multiple words, but don't want posts excluded, list all the words but include capital OR in between each word. You may also put a minus sign in front of any word to instruct the search engine to exclude that specific word.
Finally, end your entry with the phrase site:420magazine.com and google will restrict it's search to our site.
Any of these google methods can be used separately or in combination. Below is an example of a specific phrase search, limited to the 420magazine.com domain. Please note that instead of the usual 5 million results, only the few you really want are provided.
We hope these tricks and tips help you find things on the site a little more easily
