Search function doesn't work

[BertKoor]

I've left the search results default: by date, first newest. Knowing your topic was at a specific date (somewhere July 2022) finding it in the long list was rather easy. The more common the search term, the longer the list.

You can show results by Topic instead of Posts, then it is the 10th result:
search.php?keywords=fx+collection&terms ... mit=Search

[whyterabbyt]

I was aware that it didn't 'know' what is a VST and what isn't. When I said "search for a name of" a VST... I was literally only referring to the act of entering the name of it into the search box... as text, to then find instances of that text. Nothing more.

Good, Im glad you know that. Your phrasing didnt indicate that you did.

So hopefully you get that its not doing anything other than exactly what you direct it to do.
Because its not getting anything wrong. What's going 'wrong' for you is that its doing exactly what you tell it.

But, it's not new posts being added to the For Sale page. It's one original post, that is then constantly edited to add or remove text. So, if it's the date which that post was originally made that determines it, every piece of text in that post would be returned in the search results from the same date for that member (Sat Jul 23, 2022 for me). So, why is it that "adaptiverb", "stix", "flesh", "Go2", which were all added to that post at differing dates, all appear at the top of the search engine results? They are in the same post as "hybrid" and the other AIR VSTs, so why don't they also only show as coming from a post that was made 9 months ago?

That 'constant editing' you were doing; cast your mind back to changing the subject as well...

If I search for 'Hybrid' in Sell&Buy your post from 23rd july 2022 is on the 4th page of results because there are approximately 50 posts in sell&buy that include the word 'Hybrid' since the 23rd July 2022.

In contrast, if I search for 'Adaptiverb' your post from 18th April 2023 is the top search because there are no posts that contain that word in sell&buy which are more recent than that.

That's because the default search options look at the subject line of the post, as well as the post text itself.

If you look at the search system options properly, you'll see that there is a checkbox which states 'Search within', and the default option is 'Post subjects and message text'

If you leave that checked, then Search will look for the text in the body of each post and the subject of each post.

You have the word 'Adaptiverb' in the title of multiple posts in that thread, including the one from 18th April 2023, but not the word 'Hybrid,' which only appears once in that entire thread, in the body of one post, the one from 23rd July 2023.

And none of this explains why I can't find a result for "collection", to show that my For Sale page contains the text "FX Collection", when a search for "collection" does show other member's For Sale pages, also selling something labeled as "FX Collection".

No, it cant explain it, because the reason you cant find it is you didn't look through enough pages. But the original post in the thread, from 23rd July 2023, does show up. It was on page 51.

Since 'collection' is such a common word in sales threads, given the number of plugin collections there actually are (ie adding 'fx' to the search as well), there have been approximately 750 posts(*) in Sell&Buy since July 23rd 2022 which included it. But none of those are your posts in that forum after 23rd July 2023 do.

(*) BTW, there would be less posts if you'd used additional keywords, as in 'fx collection' but you've explicitly said you just searched for 'collection'

Its very simple to confirm that you've changed the subject in all later posts in that thread and removed the word 'collection' from it. Search cant find what's not there.

[Choikdoi]

I think it's sunk in now.

Thanks both of you for explaining it to me in more of a constructive way. It probably didn't help that I'm not a forum person at all, KVR was my first / and is my only forum use, so I definitely wasn't taking into account the full scale of the 'advanced' search options. Apologies if I made answering my queries more complicated than it should have been.