Revived! I posted this prematurely, the search is now live an ready for you all to trial. Please have a play around with it and then fill in the survey once you've used it a few times Feel free to say here what you think too. Your feedback is all most welcome!
Revived! I posted this prematurely, the search is now live an ready for you all to trial. Please have a play around with it and then fill in the survey once you've used it a few times Feel free to say here what you think too. Your feedback is all most welcome!
Tut tut tut... looking for a new community manager? will have ufn playing
EDIT: Wow... already much better than old search by ****ing miles... even after a second or two searching... nice one
Sorry for raining on your parade in the thread before, Jack -- with the date and all I couldn't resist. This search is much, much better and I have filled out the survey!
No problem, that's why it's Beta still Hope you shared them in the survey so we can address them?
Yep, you should recognise it as the one complaining about not being able to sort by date, and about usernames being included in the search instead of just post content.
Yep, you should recognise it as the one complaining about not being able to sort by date, and about usernames being included in the search instead of just post content.
It's a tricky balance because a lot of users want to search for usernames, though. "Arsey" is our most popular search term at exam time
It's a tricky balance because a lot of users want to search for usernames, though. "Arsey" is our most popular search term at exam time
Is it a tricky balance though? The current search manages it.
Let me give you an example.
1. Let's say I want to search for posts about bears, so I search "bears". Unfortunately there's a user called "the bear" so most of my search results are just random posts by him. Now, how many users are there registered with usernames that contain words people might search for? I'm guessing a lot. So searching for specific content doesn't work very well.
2. But maybe I want to search for all posts by the bear, like you said, this is common. Well, the results give me some of them (not in any useful order), but alongside a bunch of posts about bears by random people. So searching for specific users doesn't work either.
Not very helpful.
Why not have a couple of boxes beneath the search that are ticked as default, such as:
[tickbox] Search usernames [tickbox] Search post titles/content
Then the user can untick one of them if they wish to search ONLY for usernames or ONLY for post content.
The point about sorting is super annoying too. Let's say I search for a topic I'm interested in every few days so I can reply to posts about it. "Bowls", for example. If I search for bowls, I can filter it down to the last week, but what if I search every 3-4 days? I have to manually filter out the results from 5-7 days ago by eye in order to find the posts that have been made since my last search? I can't really figure why it isn't sorted from most recent to least anyway, but if you really don't want to do that, at least give me the option to sort the results myself.
Is it a tricky balance though? The current search manages it.
Let me give you an example.
1. Let's say I want to search for posts about bears, so I search "bears". Unfortunately there's a user called "the bear" so most of my search results are just random posts by him. Now, how many users are there registered with usernames that contain words people might search for? I'm guessing a lot. So searching for specific content doesn't work very well.
2. But maybe I want to search for all posts by the bear, like you said, this is common. Well, the results give me some of them (not in any useful order), but alongside a bunch of posts about bears by random people. So searching for specific users doesn't work either.
Not very helpful.
Why not have a couple of boxes beneath the search that are ticked as default, such as:
[tickbox] Search usernames [tickbox] Search post titles/content
Then the user can untick one of them if they wish to search ONLY for usernames or ONLY for post content.
The point about sorting is super annoying too. Let's say I search for a topic I'm interested in every few days so I can reply to posts about it. "Bowls", for example. If I search for bowls, I can filter it down to the last week, but what if I search every 3-4 days? I have to manually filter out the results from 5-7 days ago by eye in order to find the posts that have been made since my last search? I can't really figure why it isn't sorted from most recent to least anyway, but if you really don't want to do that, at least give me the option to sort the results myself.
The point about sorting is an interesting one - it's not there because it's not actually useful. The new search takes likely search relevance into account much more than the old one does, so it looks at how many search terms match, how old a thread is, how many posts it has, etc etc, and what we found conclusively when we were building it is that with all that in mind, actually sorting by date afterwards resulted in near useless results in every case. Most of the time, you just got spam threads, 0-post questions, rarely anything with more than one reply, and never anything you were looking for.
Sorting AND filtering together is a current technical limitation, and not one that's likely to change anytime soon, much as we might want it to. That's why the date filtering options were added, and those could well change, depending on your feedback!