Re: time limit between searches:
Control Panel > Site Permissions > Minimum time between searches
Set GUESTS to 60, USERS to 10... or something that works best for you.
Control Panel > Site Permissions > Can use the Search Engine
Set GUESTS to 0, Everyone else to 1.
Re: tagging. A few things to think about before going full speed in to the idea of tagging a large, already establish forum.
1) will all the old post get tagged too?
2) will everyone be able to tag, or just a select few members?
3) whats to prevent random, unrelated spammers from tagging all your posts with "spam.com"
4) to prevent abuse, will there be a preset group of words that each topic is allowed to be tagged with?
5) why are your topics not arranged by forum groups? ie; all apples & orange discussions for in the fruits forum -- all cars & truck discussions go in the automobiles forum. then, the person searching can just select the forum (or category) that they want to search within.
6) if you're going to setup something custom that auto-tags your posts based on the number of time a word is said in each post (such as a "tag-cloud"), your full database text constantly need to be re-indexed. Let Google do all this work for you with their GCS service
Have a look at UBB.Sitemaps to help search engines find all your topics:
http://www.virtualnightclub.net/detail/view/1/ubb-sitemaps.phpIf you just want to make your current search engine less confusing to your users, AND return more relevant results, AND help your users...
1) modify the DEFAULT "newer than" date range to "10 years" in your templates.
2) write a detailed help-guide regarding how the search engine on your site works, and have it display all the time -- not a link. Find in the language file, "Enter the criteria by which you wish to search in the form below." and put your new, custom, detailed instructions in that section. Also write that they may get better results by preceding each search phrase with a "+" sign... and "due to the size of our site, the more search keywords you use, the more likely you will find what your looking for. we have everything. there is no chance that you will find what you want on any other website."
BUT, if your site is so large, "Google Custom Search" is probably the best way to tackle this. The main drawback to that would be that in UBBT, you can group the results by date, in GCS you cannot.
And lastly, are your forum's topics sorted in to their correct forum categories? This is a far superior way of organizing, than keyword tagging.
There are several ways to implement the GCS -- and as Ruben mentioned above
, you dont even need to replace the UBBT stock search. Just have the GCS search-box and results appear on the ubbthreads.php/search page, above the stock search form. Note that your site has TWO search engines, one that is a "Full Site Search powered by Google" and the other is an "Advanced Search"/"Power User Search Engine" in which you can narrow your results.
EDIT:
Something to toy-with --
This URL will search only your website for only the terms listed.
https://www.google.com/#q=site:YOUR-WEBSITE.com+word1+word2+word3+word4
Eample1 - https://www.google.com/#q=site:YOUR-WEBSITE.com+word1
will search
only YOUR-WEBSITE.com for "word1"
Eample2 - https://www.google.com/#q=site:YOUR-WEBSITE.com+word1+word2
will search
only YOUR-WEBSITE.com for "word1" and "word2"
...etc
