I'm sorry, but we don't have any ETA yet. Probably we'll add an option (checkbox) to enable "exact match" in the search form or something else in upcoming 1.9.x versions.

The search will be improved for sure, but it requires total change of the working base, we will move it from the MySQL FullText to Indexed system in the next 2.x major version. This is not planned in 1.x versions for sure.

Thank you, that's pretty much what I guessed by now (i.e. total change of the working base) so although I'm disappointed the change won't come sooner I do appreciate the honest answer. Do we have any idea when we can expect 2.x? Any chance of it being this year? If not, then I may need to look at a third party solution for search so again, honesty would be very much appreciated.

Posted by: @upstartdm

In the other forum post Robert said this:

And yes, this is the case. The search result you see is based on the number of matches. The first result have the maximum number of words "debug", "under", "tools", and so on. In real life you'll search more specific phrases and the result will be more effective. Also, you can filter by date, something like "Last week" and find better result:

https://wpforo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021-03-14_16-01-14.png

The search will be improved for sure, but it requires total change of the working base, we will move it from the MySQL FullText to Indexed system in the next 2.x major version. This is not planned in 1.x versions for sure.

Thank you, but I didn't mean a similar topic. I meant a similar search result. Please use wpForo.com search form and find the issue you see in your website. Provide the search phrase that brings incorrect result like it does in your website.

https://wpforo.com/community/how-to-and-troubleshooting-2/how-to-require-all-new-members-to-be-manually-approved-with-email/

and randomly selected the phrase "debug under tools" from the third post from the end and put that into the search box. This post is then returned as the 10th result on the results page with the other results just having one or more of the words but not the exact phrase. The 1st result doesn't even show/highlight any of the words.

That example took me about 3 minutes to find. I'm honestly not trying to be a pain with this but we run a professional forum where many of our members tell me they use Google (i.e. site:www.website.com) instead of the built in forum search because the results are so poor. It's impacting our credibility as a business so I need to push for a solution.

In the other forum post Robert said this:

wpForo doesn't have "exact phrase" search logic. So don't even try it. wpForo search is based on the FullText index provided by MySQL database engine. This search become more smart with the MySQL version. For example, the full-text search is many times smarter in MySQL 8.x versions then in the old 5.6 version.

In any case the best solution is adding "exact text" search option in wpForo. We've just added it in our to-do list and will add it in upcoming update. I have no any ETA yet, but we'll do our best to release it as soon as possible.

but that was 6 months ago and we're still waiting for any improvement.

Could you please find the similar issue here at wpForo.com to avoid site and database specific issues.