Deetman Posted April 6, 2006 Share Posted April 6, 2006 As many of you have probably noticed and let us know, the search on this forum is fairly miserable in getting appropriate results. We are investigation ways to improve the search, but we want to know what you think would make the results more relevant. Are there not enough results? Too many? Search returns irrelevant results? Let us know what can be done to improve our forum search here! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jbjonas Posted April 6, 2006 Share Posted April 6, 2006 simple answer. One word searches work fine. Make the Boolean searches (and searching for a "phrase in quotes") work better. Something more like Google. Currently the results from an on site search using boolean search terms are confusing at best, and erroneous and useless otherwise. I have suggested using an in page google site search before, but there are obvious drawbacks there as well. Most notably, results would only be from the latest googlebot cache. So I don't know the solution, but that is what I think needs to be fixed... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brainbone Posted April 6, 2006 Share Posted April 6, 2006 Boolean searching would be best, and it's easy to implement since MySQL will do all the work for you, provided you're using full text indexing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
domino Posted April 6, 2006 Share Posted April 6, 2006 I think the search feature on most BB work fine, excluding phpBB of course. There's only so much the forum admins can do to make it easier for member to find what they need. It all eventually boils down to the person querying the words and the person posting the topic. They'll just need to be a bit more inventive than typing in "ATI/nvidia card problem" or "can not boot" in the search box. The new topic poster will need to be a bit aware on the topic they create. Make sure the topic grabs attention and to the point. No, "I need help here" {censored}. Those just need to be automatically deleted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ignorantcow Posted April 8, 2006 Share Posted April 8, 2006 Boolean searching would be best, and it's easy to implement since MySQL will do all the work for you, provided you're using full text indexing. Yeah, definitely turn on Full Text Searching.. or does Invision not support this common feature? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brainbone Posted April 9, 2006 Share Posted April 9, 2006 Yeah, definitely turn on Full Text Searching.. or does Invision not support this common feature? Yes IPB supports it, and it would help alleviate some load from their DB since it could use an index. Right now, it appears they have it set-up to search using ‘like’ (can't use an index -- think it's called "Manual" search in IPB?) instead of ‘match’ with a full text index. Without a useable index, things will get much worse as the post count grows. With a full text index, they could probably even open up searching to guests - however they may need to change ft_min_word_len and ft_stopword_file, then re-index to tune the results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
doblANy Posted August 6, 2006 Share Posted August 6, 2006 As a new user to these forums the search function makes it very hard and time consuming to find what you need. I'm sure if you did a poll on what to improve the search feature would be the winner. The reason is two fold. As a user I want the information right away and some other less patient users will simply post straight away after 10/15 minutes of searching. This means you get multiple threads on the same subject. The second reason is that you get multiple threads on the same subject so the Mods and the more Senior users are constanly repeating themselves. How the search needs to be improved upon has already been advised but basically work towards a google style search algathrym. Also if this is resolved you'll use up less storage space on your servers, less bandwidth, improve usability and make the Mods feel happy (I'm assuming) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bubbaganoush Posted August 6, 2006 Share Posted August 6, 2006 The search function works fine. It can't scan your brain and tell you exactly what you want but with a little patience and reading you'll find a lot of helpful stuff! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
other Posted August 6, 2006 Share Posted August 6, 2006 Btw you did try this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bofors Posted August 7, 2006 Share Posted August 7, 2006 How hard would it be to add a Google search feature to the site? I mean, a simple text field with a script that would tell Google to search the site for the content and display the normal Google results page. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swad Posted August 7, 2006 Share Posted August 7, 2006 How hard would it be to add a Google search feature to the site? I mean, a simple text field with a script that would tell Google to search the site for the content and display the normal Google results page. Pretty easy - check out the Google box on the portal and the blogs. We added them when we moved over to InsanelyMac. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bofors Posted August 7, 2006 Share Posted August 7, 2006 Pretty easy - check out the Google box on the portal and the blogs. We added them when we moved over to InsanelyMac. I am not sure what you are talking about. I think I see the search "boxes" you added, but they appear to be hooked to the Invision search engine, not Google. EDIT: Nevermind, I see it now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bofors Posted August 7, 2006 Share Posted August 7, 2006 I found the Google search feature you were talking about, but it does not seem to work right. Selecting a search of "InsanelyMac" results in a global web search, not the local search I want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quixos Posted August 8, 2006 Share Posted August 8, 2006 if you have a Google search hidden somewhere here, make it easy as falling to find. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlterSack Posted August 9, 2006 Share Posted August 9, 2006 For me, i have the Problem that searching brings me a resultlist of threads in which my search term is found. But i have no clue on which page of the thread (which often spans over 10 pages) the search term is found. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
other Posted August 9, 2006 Share Posted August 9, 2006 When searching go to the advanced options and click on show results as posts. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mebster Posted August 24, 2006 Share Posted August 24, 2006 I don't know much about searching techniques but is there not a method where it searched for your words and orders it in most often viewed/posted. I know that isn't a guarantee to work all the time but would have thought would be better than what we currently have. I HATE the search on this site. It's useless. I often just go to google and type "Project OSx86" and then my text. Or i guess not it would be "InsanelyMac" (no quotes needed). Seems to work much better than the internal search. In my experience anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wondergod Posted October 10, 2006 Share Posted October 10, 2006 add the power of google to your search Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
other Posted October 10, 2006 Share Posted October 10, 2006 add the power of google to your search Interresting idea, maybe we'll have a look at something for v2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wondergod Posted October 25, 2006 Share Posted October 25, 2006 in regards to a google search....check this out http://www.google.com/coop/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rammjet Posted October 25, 2006 Share Posted October 25, 2006 I don't know much about searching techniques but is there not a method where it searched for your words and orders it in most often viewed/posted. I know that isn't a guarantee to work all the time but would have thought would be better than what we currently have. I HATE the search on this site. It's useless. Everybody uses the Search function in its default mode. I have posted over 3000 posts, most of them to help newbies. I do not keep all the info in my head. For a good 75% of my answers, I use the Search function on the board. In the keyword - don't put too many keywords in. If someone spelled wrongly or didn't use that particular keyword combination, the search won't find what you are looking for. Only search for the most important thing. If you are trying to diagnose a problem with an ATI Radeon 9700 video card, just search for "9700". If you add the other stuff, you might miss postings that just said ATI 9700 or Radeon 9700 or 9700 graphics. Also, what if the user has typed "I have an ATI card. The 9700 Radeon". If you search for "Radeon 9700", it probably won't show up. Instead, search for "Radeon and 9700". This will find both words anywhere in the posting, not just side-by-side. Search in ALL FORUMS. People are not respecting the forum structure. They are posting everywhere. So the answers may be anywhere. By default, the Search function displays the threads that meet your search criteria. This isn't helpful if the thread is 20 pages long. Which posting is the one you want? So, in the bottom right, click on Show Results as Posts. This will display the most recent post that meets your search criteria and the rest are in reverse chronological order. If you find a posting that is interesting and you want to read the postings after it in the thread, there is a link in the bottom center of the posting window. Click that to bring up that posting in its thread. Lastly, if you know you saw a thread with a particular word in the title, put that word into keyword. Then go to the bottom right and click on Search Titles Only. Do not select Show Results as Posts. User names can help if you know them. I happen to know the Koverg patch is in a thread with "700" in the title. So, I search for "700" as keyword and "Koverg" as member name. Then check Search Titles Only. Voila, the Koverg patch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mebster Posted October 25, 2006 Share Posted October 25, 2006 Rammjet say:" :censored2: you all. why can't you use the search properly, it makes me . feel like i'm trying to help you because your so thick" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rammjet Posted October 25, 2006 Share Posted October 25, 2006 Rammjet say:" :censored2: you all. why can't you use the search properly, it makes me . feel like i'm trying to help you because your so thick" No, I too used to think the search function sucked. Until I started using it more and using the features it has. Then discovered it isn't so bad. I'm just trying to pass on what I learned so your experience doesn't suck as bad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zealot Posted October 25, 2006 Share Posted October 25, 2006 you are right rammjet. at first it sucks, ones you get use to the search its fine. but the truth is that people who is lazy it is lazy at the computer too so they always ask for the answer .(ask Jas) greetings Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoenix3200 Posted October 31, 2006 Share Posted October 31, 2006 You guys had running (for a short period of time) a more advanced search engine which I enjoyed. The problems I see with the search engine is that it doesn't do much more than phrase searching. At times I have needed to do a search for stuff like NTFS SATA and all I get is search results with the exact phrase NTFS SATA, instead of posts that simultaneously contain both NTFS as well as SATA. If someone wanted to search for an exact phrase, they should just need to use quotes surrounding what they need. I would also enjoy seeing a wildcard search option, like if someone was searching for help with their x1000-series graphics cards, they'd type in ATI x1*, and they would get results that contained ATI, as well as any variations like x1600, x1800, and x1950. It might also help if we were able to say what we DIDN'T want to search for. There's several ways of doing this, but I would say if you stole a page from the eBay search engine, that would be terrific. Quite frankly, I wish eBay's search methods were linked together with Google's database, since Google doesn't support wildcard searches. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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