I need the filtering tbh, and I feel the TSR one is better organised. What would be nice to have on the current search is an option to search members without us having to go to the Find Members bit in the footer of the site.
Oh wow, until you mentioned that Find Members thing, I had no idea it even existed! I guess I never look in the bottom bit of web pages.
Switching to Google Site Search will cause a lot of old threads to resurface, as Google typically doesn't care if something is a year old, the algorithm just places stuff at the top according to the famed link ranker, etc. This will confuse users and we will see old threads being treated as current. That in turn will cause the site admins to eventually lock all old threads or even block them out to google, which would also be a shame.
Oh wow, until you mentioned that Find Members thing, I had no idea it even existed! I guess I never look in the bottom bit of web pages.
Switching to Google Site Search will cause a lot of old threads to resurface, as Google typically doesn't care if something is a year old, the algorithm just places stuff at the top according to the famed link ranker, etc. This will confuse users and we will see old threads being treated as current. That in turn will cause the site admins to eventually lock all old threads or even block them out to google, which would also be a shame.
Glad I could help
And actually yes that's a very good call with old threads, we don't really need an extra reason for people to bump old threads!
Works all good for me, and is much faster than the previous one. However, I dont like it having google search, I think having on site search with the new format would be cool
I absolutely hate google searches within websites, please keep as is, as I actually use it a fair bit and would be annoyed if it got changed to the above
Maybe it's just me being inflexible but I really much prefer the old system. I'll admit that the new search is faster but I think the old search interface is much nicer and much more informative. Google search is fine for Google, but I'm very happy with the old TSR search.
Do you ever use the little search box at the top-right of the page? We're looking at ways to make this on-site search much better and more useful - and one of the things we're considering is replacing it with Google Custom Search.
You can get an idea of how that would look on this test search page. Next time you need to search TSR, please try using this search page and then add a post here to let us know what you think. If lots of people like it, we'll look into properly integrating it into the site.
What we're using here is a simple embed of Google that is targeted specifically at TSR. That means you can use all the usual Google functionality (such as search modifiers) and it also means that the results that are returned are exactly the same as you would get from Google. We do block some of our pages from Google - including member profiles and any content that is only for subscribers (such as learning tools). So you wouldn't be able to find those using this search.
Well, I'd turn that question round to you. Are you happy with the current search? If so, that's great news - but we've had a fair bit of feedback from people who would like to see it improved.
The only thing lacking from the current search is the option to display results as threads (so if you're looking for a thread you can find it without trawling through hundreds of posts using your search terms on a different thread).
This doesn't seem a useful alternative to the current search tool. It removes useful functionality like filtering by forum or user (quite often I search my own posts to find something I need to refer back to)
Can I suggest restricting searching to logged in members and offering this google search option to non-logged in visitors? That would reduce some of the impact on the servers, offer an incentive for visitors to sign up and not remove functionality for members.
Out of curiosity would it also show stuff from the moderation section too?
Only if they've ever been on the public site - AFAIK, Google essentially sees what a guest has permission to view.
In terms of the functionality of the search, I'd suggest that for a site with the diversity of topics that TSR does, the ability to narrow search results by forum (i.e., by topic) is very important - something that I don't think would be achievable with the search options that Google allows. There will also be issues from Google's results including words that appear on TSR pages (e.g., in the header, footer, postbit, etc.), whereas what people will generally be looking for is going to be the content just in posts.
The way that Google returns results is also likely to be problematic for those with non-standard settings for posts per page - if you want to find a specific post, Google is going to take you to the page that it sees it as being on, but when you're logged in, the page numbering is different.
Do you ever use the little search box at the top-right of the page? We're looking at ways to make this on-site search much better and more useful - and one of the things we're considering is replacing it with Google Custom Search.
You can get an idea of how that would look on this test search page. Next time you need to search TSR, please try using this search page and then add a post here to let us know what you think. If lots of people like it, we'll look into properly integrating it into the site.
What we're using here is a simple embed of Google that is targeted specifically at TSR. That means you can use all the usual Google functionality (such as search modifiers) and it also means that the results that are returned are exactly the same as you would get from Google. We do block some of our pages from Google - including member profiles and any content that is only for subscribers (such as learning tools). So you wouldn't be able to find those using this search.