forum search functionality

[atomizer]

i know this has been mentioned before, but this is really annoying...

1) i can sort of understand the 3 character limit when searching, though it is a pain - cant add words like "ie", "oe", "cd", "nt", "98", etc., etc., etc.. these words are no less important to returning relevant results than any other words.

if it's possible to just filter out useless words, then that would be a much better solution (filter "it", "to", "as", etc.). i know there's redundant threads being created because of this annoyance. i've done it myself.

2) the real annoyance is when you want to search for a phrase and this limit is STILL in place.

3) another huge annoyance is when you do a search and a thread with multiple pages is returned - the search results do not indicate on which page(s) your search string was found. with many threads having 25, 50 or more pages, this makes the search results virtually useless and a waste of bandwidth and the users time.

Edited January 13, 2006 by atomizer

[Alanoll]

3) another huge annoyance is when you do a search and a thread with multiple pages is returned - the search results do not indicate on which page(s) your search string was found. with many threads having 25, 50 or more pages, this makes the search results virtually useless and a waste of bandwidth and the users time.

The can be solved two ways. First way, is when using the search form, to actually tell it to return in post form (there's a radio button to select).

The second option, is after finding the thread, to search within the thread. There's a search box at the bottom of EVERY topic, to search WITHIN that specific topic.

[atomizer]

The can be solved two ways. First way, is when using the search form, to actually tell it to return in post form (there's a radio button to select).

The second option, is after finding the thread, to search within the thread. There's a search box at the bottom of EVERY topic, to search WITHIN that specific topic.

thanks for the tips. the first method still returns a lot of useless pages, however the second method is somewhat better. as long as i've been hanging around here, i've always ignored the option to search within a topic. still, neither method is as intuitive as some forums that provide a link to the page(s) where your search term was found, and then highlight the terms as well. the latter is minor however, as the google toolbar or 'search as you type' can do that.

thanks!

[Alanoll]

The can be solved two ways. First way, is when using the search form, to actually tell it to return in post form (there's a radio button to select).

The second option, is after finding the thread, to search within the thread. There's a search box at the bottom of EVERY topic, to search WITHIN that specific topic.

thanks for the tips. the first method still returns a lot of useless pages, however the second method is somewhat better. as long as i've been hanging around here, i've always ignored the option to search within a topic. still, neither method is as intuitive as some forums that provide a link to the page(s) where your search term was found, and then highlight the terms as well. the latter is minor however, as the google toolbar or 'search as you type' can do that.

thanks!

i feel like you're not using the search results as posts option correctly. If you click the link with the post #number, it's usually at the bottom of the result, it will link directly to the post, instead of the first post in the topic.

[atomizer]

thanks again.

what about the character limit when doing phrase searches though?

[xper]

I will work on it.

[atomizer]

thanks!

that should really help improve the search functionality and save us users some time.

[Volatus]

Bumpity bump bump! (instead of starting a new topic )

I'm finding the search function here horribly problematic as well. When searching a forum for more than one word, it treats it as "Or" - that is, if I search for "windows keys don't work", it'll include topics with the word "windows", the word "keys", the word "don't", or the word "work", instead of topics with all of them! When I searched for that, I literally got returned the entire forum I searched, including all stickies. I don't know of a single person on the planet that would want to search for something using an "or" mechanism... it's got to be confusing for people! Using Google across this site isn't much helpful either... Google has gotten progressively worse over the years. So to get around that, I had to do "+windows +keys +don't +work", but I shouldn't have to add plusses behind each word just to search for something. That should be the default behavior, right?

Just my three cents, since search is such an important part of any informative forum like this.

[tain]

Thanks for the bump. Our search engine has known issues as noted in this thead and these threads. The more info we have, the more likely we'll be able to fix it. But right now we don't have an estimate of when it will get fixed.

Thanks!

[Tarun]

There's a mod for IP.Board to allow a Sphinx search engine that may resolve these issues.

http://mods.invisionize.com/db/index.php/f/7203

[tain]

Advanced search is fixed now. Thanks to everyone that reported problems. That helped us fix this annoying bug!

[GrofLuigi]

Advanced search is fixed now. Thanks to everyone that reported problems. That helped us fix this annoying bug!

Or is it? See what one of the "Advanced Usage Help" examples gives:

http://www.msfn.org/board/search.html&CODE=show&searchid=1a8740178ffa3636f83a0673ada36ebc&search_in=posts&result_type=topics&highlite=%2B+apple+-juice

(I hope word wrap doesn't break it.)

Basically, search for

+apples -juice

doesn't give the expected results. (-juice) is ignored, sometimes treated like (OR juice), sometimes like (+juice).

Or maybe my Opera is playing with me? I hope not, everything else works perfectly.

GL