search.boards.ie Feedback - phase 2

Dav

Hello all,

We’ve gone through the thread and have made some more changes based on your feedback. In order to make things easier to manage, I’m starting this off as a new thread as this will make it easier to manage any further bug reports and feedback.

This is a big list, so if you’ve found a bug or have a problem with some functionality, please have a look to see if we’ve already been notified or have addressed it.

So based on the other thread we’ve put together this list...

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Suggestions that have been implemented, or have been introduced as part of the Advanced Search functionality:

- Sort results by Date range/Forum/Poster/Thanks/Oldest/Thread Title
• Now handled in Advanced Search.

Note: Newest First is a sort option along the top of the results page.

- Ability to refine your search beforehand
• This is available by going directly to the Advanced Search page from the main search page.

- You have not used the :visited css selector at all. So users basically can't tell the links they have already visited. That's a simple one line css addition. The :hover one could also be used.
• This is implemented now.

- Search by username/Vanity Searches (this is an industry term, please don’t be annoyed by this )
• This is fixed now, you can search for a username – as before, and it won't work well if you have a common username. We know there are still a few bugs remaining and we're working on them.
People with special characters in their names may still suffer some bugs and if you have more than one word in your name, you’ll need to put it in quotes.

- Searching for a pipe returns a 503 error
• Fixed now.

- Any way of setting your favourite forms rather than searching all the time you want to fine it
• Available in advanced search – there’s a “My Followed Forums” option in the “Search by forum:” drop-down menu.

- I cannot search for where my posts were quoted; just putting your name in the search term (rather than author) and selecting to return by posts would return this in the old search. These results are omitted by the new search.
• This is working now.

- I hope the new search will allow for short strings (2-3-4 letters) and wildcard, with instructions readily displayed on how to use the different search operators (""/+/-/AND/OR/*), etc.
• Short strings and wildcards are currently implemented. AND and OR are not explicitly available at present, but it’s something we’re hoping to include in the future (I don’t have a timeframe, sorry).

Things we cannot implement and things that we recommend you don't use the search for:

- search/return threads rather than posts
• Due to the set up of the new search system this is not possible. We tested this and found that we would get a skewed set of results as it tended to favour mega-threads which may have many thousands of posts, several hundred of which may contain the keywords.

- Search for all threads I have posted on and see what has had new posts (and which are most recently updated) since I was last on boards - I use advanced search, enter my username in author and select show results by threads. I cannot get this information from the new search
• You can't do this through the new search however this functionality exists with the site by visiting "My Threads" in your User Control Panel. You can click the “Follow Thread” button to add a thread you have not posted in to your “My Threads” list.

- 'intelligent search' eg devalera = De Valera
• Not something we can easily do at present - our search is similar to Google in that you'll get different numbers of results of De Valera and Devalera. Our search splits terms on capital letters. If you don’t use capital letters, the system won’t understand that you’re attempting to search for a name. However, if you do search for “devalera”, you’ll get “De Valera” results.

- Search by tags
• Our search works on full texting indexing and tags are not very widely used on the site, so searching by tags is somewhat un-necessary.

- Allow users to set the number of search results per page
• Currently set at 15, but this is possibly something we'll look into in the future

- Could also use the date posted in the results in addition to how long ago the result page was posted.
• We purposely used this format for ease of use

- Is this able to search forums like tCN where there is no postcount? the old search wasn't able to, i think
• tCN is not a searchable forum. Because we were getting skewed results, we have excluded some forums and any that were previously not indexed, remain so (Personal/Relationship Issues for example)

- The old one used to display a different icon if someone had responded to a thread you posted in when you select "Find more Posts by xxxxx"
• We’d recommend you use the My Threads tab and the Follow Thread functionality – any thread you post in automatically gets added to your my Threads.

- If I use the "Find More Posts by xxx" that drops down if you click a users name I get the new search with a different layout and skin.
- I use a theme too, it just vanishes
• New search doesn't and won't support themes/skins

- I cannot get it to return all threads i've posted in in the order that they were last posted in. In particular if a thread I posted in goes quiet for 2 weeks, then gets a few post in it, it is impossible for me to tell that it's active again because that thread would be buried in a bunch of my posts (down the list) with no signs the thread had been updated. With the old search, that thread would be right up near the top cause someone posted in it recently and I can see the date/time of the last post in the thread
• Again, the My Threads and Follow Thread functionality was built with this in mind and is, we believe, an easier way to manage this.

- it isn't displaying posts people made in the Thunderdome
• Not a searchable forum

- would it be possible to have an option to sort posts by 'last thanked'
• No, not something we're going to do as like tags, it would have limited use

- Add "Last year" to date range filter on LHS
• This is performance related and would use too many system resources. It’s also a result set most people would not need. However, you can set date ranges in the advanced search section if you need results greater than a month.


Things we are considering:

Note: this is not a commitment to make these things happen, but in some cases we are thinking about these suggestions.

- Search by thankers

- Remember your filters when you search and then re-search, or when you search and then click the back button on your browser

- Change the default search results to newest to be displayed first
• We will consider allowing users to set their own default, however our search is primarily being used as a content search, so we believe that displaying the best match is the best default for most users/ searches (it's a single click difference)

- Dropdown menus are not working
• we're aware of this and looking into integrating it

- Display more than ten forums on the left hand side of the search results

- The previous and next pagination links at the bottom should be moved further away from the individual page links to minimse misclicking. See the 2 gaps in Google's pagination link layout.
• We agree that this requires some tweaking

- Also, if ever that clunky forum list can be replaced by the "find a forum" box from the beta menu, that would be fantastic.
• We'll work on this interface.

- move the forum the result is posted in to the start of the indented results
• Good idea, we'll look into it.

- I'd like to see the thread title included. That's what the link at the top of the posts should read rather than the first few words of the post.
• Could get confusing as it raises the question of whether we use post or thread titles. It will look bad as a search will return multiple results from same thread which is a readability issue. Currently "best match" search is weighted towards thread titles.

- Would it be possible to subscribe to an RSS feed for a search similar to the feed you can subscribe to in Google Blog search?
• Will look into it

- ALSO is there any link i can click on the search page that will bring me back to the boards home page?
• Will look into this.

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So that's the list - it's by no means definitive, but it's what we're working from for now. If you have any more issues, bugs, comments etc, please feel free to add them here.

aidan_walsh

- search/return threads rather than posts
• Due to the set up of the new search system this is not possible. We tested this and found that we would get a skewed set of results as it tended to favour mega-threads which may have many thousands of posts, several hundred of which may contain the keywords.

- Search for all threads I have posted on and see what has had new posts (and which are most recently updated) since I was last on boards - I use advanced search, enter my username in author and select show results by threads. I cannot get this information from the new search
• You can't do this through the new search however this functionality exists with the site by visiting "My Threads" in your User Control Panel. You can click the “Follow Thread” button to add a thread you have not posted in to your “My Threads” list.

I don't see this sitting well I'm afraid.

mike65

Use the basic search, advanced returns 20,000,000 hits and is quite useless.

simple search http://www.boards.ie/search/?q=chciken+and+mushroom+pie+mike65
advanced search http://www.boards.ie/search/advanced.php?q=Chicken%2Band%2Bmushroom%2Bpie%2Bmike65

The Cush

When I search for the word "conjunction" in my posts in the Terrestrial forum with the vBulletin search I get 31 results between Oct 2008 and Mar 2011.

The new advanced search returns 20m+ results of not what I want. The advance search isn't working.

RolandIRL

mike65 wrote: »

Use the basic search, advanced returns 20,000,000 hits and is quite useless.

simple search http://www.boards.ie/search/?q=chciken+and+mushroom+pie+mike65
advanced search http://www.boards.ie/search/advanced.php?q=Chicken%2Band%2Bmushroom%2Bpie%2Bmike65

just to point out, you've spelt chicken wrong in the simple search, spelling it right returns the same results as the advanced search.


just looking at the simple search, i think an option to search thread title only on it would be handier than having to go into the advanced search. most times i used the vB search, it was the title i put in.

mike65

LOL, correct spelling 130 results, wrong spelling 2 results including the correct post.

pickarooney

Any idea if the scrolling forum list will be replaced by the Find a Forum box?

Search for posts by username in forum still returns 0 results when I try to find a post made by me in Net/Comms. I have 35 posts in there, findable in 1 second with the old search.

It's really disappointing that some of the most basic functions from the old search can/will not be implemented. For me, this makes the new search 80% useless.
Just as an example, how would you go about finding a thread on the film Blue Valentine in films? I know there is at least one but the search engine refuses to find it (the old one, available from the link at the bottom of the search page, finds it immediately). Actually, make that 90% useless. Does the search even look in child forums? There's no tick box for it.

Honestly, I think you should have just pulled the old search with an announcement that it was crashing the site too often, then a month later brought in the new one. It would then be appreciated as better than nothing as opposed to worse than what we had.

Steve

Dav wrote: »

- I'd like to see the thread title included. That's what the link at the top of the posts should read rather than the first few words of the post.
• Could get confusing as it raises the question of whether we use post or thread titles. It will look bad as a search will return multiple results from same thread which is a readability issue. Currently "best match" search is weighted towards thread titles.

Speaking as a mod, this is a need rather than a want.

I *need* to be able to find what threads that someone has posted in in forums I mod - I can only guess at the moment with this search.

It's a pain having to use an external search like Google to get accurate results when a search procedure that has direct db access is missing stuff.

That said, it's understandable why Google is better given they can throw a couple of hundred of their processors into a search when needs be.

copacetic

there were a number of posts on the last thread before it was closed which seemed to be ignored in the OP above.

Basically the search doesn't work. nothing about features. It returns incorrect results. I
think it was working ok, then stopped.

As far as I can tell the search stopped indexing about a week ago, or there is a long gap between indexes, or it hasn't properley indexed everything yet.

--LOS--

I really really do not like the new search system, especially for looking back for something through your own post stats. I wish you could search for newest first without the indentation and grouping of posts in the same forum, it makes it so much less clear the way it is now

Hank_Jones

I really miss being able to open tabs to forums through previous posts.

I would generally go to "find posts" and then open the forums through the links to the forums, which isn't possible any more.

So now, I have to go to my previous posts, open them, and then go to the top of the thread and open the forum that way.

I know I can use "My Forums", it's just the habit that I got into.
Would open the previous posts and the forums themselves.

Zab

Dav wrote: »

- search/return threads rather than posts
• Due to the set up of the new search system this is not possible. We tested this and found that we would get a skewed set of results as it tended to favour mega-threads which may have many thousands of posts, several hundred of which may contain the keywords.

Can you not just use the search for posts algorithm and then group the results into threads? Even just stepping through the results and displaying the thread title if it's the first instance of a post from that thread.

- Search for all threads I have posted on and see what has had new posts (and which are most recently updated) since I was last on boards - I use advanced search, enter my username in author and select show results by threads. I cannot get this information from the new search
• You can't do this through the new search however this functionality exists with the site by visiting "My Threads" in your User Control Panel. You can click the “Follow Thread” button to add a thread you have not posted in to your “My Threads” list.

Are you saying this is also technically infeasible or just that you don't plan to support it?

--LOS--

can there not be a link back to user cp while in the search?

Sad Professor

--LOS-- wrote: »

can there not be a link back to user cp while in the search?

Just clicking on your username in the top right corner does this.

lil_lisa

I'm having a lot of trouble with this new search. For example, I go to search the design forum for the word "icon" and it doesn't give me what I want so I decide to change the keyword, it then gives me the results for the entire boards forum, not just the design forum. This means, I have to go back to boards.ie, go to the specific forum and click "Search this forum" again to change the keyword. That's a very complicated way of doing it. Is there any way of keeping the current forum in the search without going back or going to the Advanced search?

starbelgrade

As far as I can see, you still can't find posts in which people quoted you.

--LOS--

lil_lisa wrote: »

I'm having a lot of trouble with this new search. For example, I go to search the design forum for the word "icon" and it doesn't give me what I want so I decide to change the keyword, it then gives me the results for the entire boards forum, not just the design forum. This means, I have to go back to boards.ie, go to the specific forum and click "Search this forum" again to change the keyword. That's a very complicated way of doing it. Is there any way of keeping the current forum in the search without going back or going to the Advanced search?

I've noticed this too, I just hate everything about the new search, please bring the old one back or let us have the choice to use the old one

OutlawPete

lil_lisa wrote: »

I'm having a lot of trouble with this new search. For example, I go to search the design forum for the word "icon" and it doesn't give me what I want so I decide to change the keyword, it then gives me the results for the entire boards forum, not just the design forum. This means, I have to go back to boards.ie, go to the specific forum and click "Search this forum" again to change the keyword. That's a very complicated way of doing it. Is there any way of keeping the current forum in the search without going back or going to the Advanced search?

There is but not sure why it's not being used.

I have been on many sites that use a similar tree of forums in those drop-down lists and for instance, lets say you wanted After Hours to be highlighted so as to be searched, you would just keep hitting the letter 'A' on your keyboard and it should scroll through all forums beginning with the letter 'A'.

At the moment it is half-happening as if you hit the letter 'H' it will jump to 'Hosted' - not sure why it's only that particular letter or why it's not then cycling through the rest of the forums beginning with 'H' when the keys is continuously pressed.

I like the new search though. Think once a few issues are ironed out and maybe that it becomes a little more aesthetically pleasing also, people will eventually come to prefer it over the old one.

28064212

lil_lisa wrote: »

I'm having a lot of trouble with this new search. For example, I go to search the design forum for the word "icon" and it doesn't give me what I want so I decide to change the keyword, it then gives me the results for the entire boards forum, not just the design forum. This means, I have to go back to boards.ie, go to the specific forum and click "Search this forum" again to change the keyword. That's a very complicated way of doing it. Is there any way of keeping the current forum in the search without going back or going to the Advanced search?

After the initial search for "icon", instead of just changing the search in the box, click "Advanced Search", then change the search there, it remembers which forum you selected. Not perfect, but it's only one extra click

28064212

Dav wrote: »

- I'd like to see the thread title included. That's what the link at the top of the posts should read rather than the first few words of the post.
• Could get confusing as it raises the question of whether we use post or thread titles. It will look bad as a search will return multiple results from same thread which is a readability issue. Currently "best match" search is weighted towards thread titles.

To me, this is the single biggest usability issue with the search. The thread title is what decides whether I click into the result or not. In the new search, I have to click the results to find out if the thread actually has any relevance.

If readability is a concern, maybe something like this would work:

"SEARCH RESULT"
20 minutes ago in Feedback by 28064212, 2 Replies, 2 Views
In thread: "search.boards.ie Feedback - phase 2"

So that it's not prominent, but there if you're looking for it.

The fact that there will be multiple results from that thread is a reason for inclusion of the thread title, not against it. If I click a result and realise that thread has no relevance, I want to be easily able to filter out the remaining posts so I don't continually click into it when it's not what I'm looking for

And it should definitely be thread titles, not post titles, which almost nobody uses, and tend to be repeated in the text when they are

ibarelycare

--LOS-- wrote: »

I've noticed this too, I just hate everything about the new search, please bring the old one back or let us have the choice to use the old one

You can use the old one, there's a link at the bottom of the new search page to use the old vBulletin search.

Also, if you right click on the "search" link in the toolbar (between New Posts and Quick Links), and click "open in new tab" it opens up the old search for some reason!

Dav

Hello all,

We have a few more quick updates which will be set live later on today:

• On the search results page, the forum title below the post will now link to the forum in which it was posted.
• Also on the search results page, the member name will now link to the member profile instead of searching for other posts by that member (which is the way VBulletin search works)
• A "search sub-forums" option will be made available, and will be the default option on the advanced page.

Thank you to all of you for the continued feedback, we've done our best to answer all questions from the last thread in this one. There was some overlap in some of the issues raised, but if you feel we've missed yours, if I could ask you the big favour of posting it here again, we'll be able to get an answer for you more quickly.

Quick note to the Mods: We're definitely not going to take away your ability to search as you need it. The main focus is to get "content" search working which covers the majority of people's needs for search. The old search is still available for those sorts of tasks should you need it and will emain so until we have a more complete solution for Moderation tasks.

To address some of the comments raised:

The Cush:
- When I search for the word "conjunction" in my posts in the Terrestrial forum with the vBulletin search I get 31 results between Oct 2008 and Mar 2011.
* the link you provided was to an "old" VBulletin search and those URLs are not savable, so I couldn't replicate what you were experiencing. Please feel free to repost it here or to PM it to me.

- The new advanced search returns 20m+ results of not what I want. The advance search isn't working.
* the link you provided is a "blank" search so you seem to have searched for "" and it's returned every post on the site Using the Back button can sometimes clear the search string.

--LOS--:
- I wish you could search for newest first without the indentation and grouping of posts in the same forum, it makes it so much less clear the way it is now
* So you would prefer to be able to see a list of your last posts in exact chronological order rather than based on the threads you posted in? The My Threads functionallity already covers this.

Hank Jones:
- So now, I have to go to my previous posts, open them, and then go to the top of the thread and open the forum that way.

I know I can use "My Forums", it's just the habit that I got into.
* Well the My Forums/Threads functionallity was developed specifically for this purpose and so your issue is one of "unexpected/unusual use" rather than a flaw in the system. As this functionallity isn't available in Search I'm afraid I think you're going to have to switch yourself over to the My Forums list.

Zab:
- Can you not just use the search for posts algorithm and then group the results into threads? Even just stepping through the results and displaying the thread title if it's the first instance of a post from that thread.
* Honestly I'm not sure if it's as simple as that as I'm not involved in the nuts and bolts development, but I will ask.

- Are you saying this is also technically infeasible or just that you don't plan to support it?
* I'm sure it's technically possible, but we don't plan to support it as that functionallity is already covered by the My Forums/Threads list.

lil_lisa:
- For example, I go to search the design forum for the word "icon" and it doesn't give me what I want so I decide to change the keyword, it then gives me the results for the entire boards forum, not just the design forum.
* I believe that if you use the Back Button, it will reset some of your search options, we're investigating this. The current work around is as suggested earlier to click into Advanced Search and go from there.

pickarooney

Looking forward to testing it later to see if there's any improvement.

Cookie_Monster

I hate it:

It changes the look and layout of boards when searching to something totally different to the rest of the site.

It now takes an advanced search to find threads started by never mind that one, just me being stoopid

-1 from me, the old one was so much better, simpler and more visually appealing

pickarooney

I'm happy to report that a good number of the issues are resolved or at least satisfactorily worked around. It's still going to take a lot of getting used to the absence of an option to display results as threads and I can't quite get my head around the fact that I can choose to search for a word in a thread's title but don't get the thread itself returned.

Upshot is - major improvement today.

The Cush

Dav wrote: »

To address some of the comments raised:

The Cush:
- When I search for the word "conjunction" in my posts in the Terrestrial forum with the vBulletin search I get 31 results between Oct 2008 and Mar 2011.
* the link you provided was to an "old" VBulletin search and those URLs are not savable, so I couldn't replicate what you were experiencing. Please feel free to repost it here or to PM it to me.

- The new advanced search returns 20m+ results of not what I want. The advance search isn't working.
* the link you provided is a "blank" search so you seem to have searched for "" and it's returned every post on the site Using the Back button can sometimes clear the search string.

Hi Dav

Just did a new advanced search for the word "conjunction" in my posts in the terrestrial forum and still got 20,965,564 results (0.098 seconds).

The old vBulletin search returned "Showing results 1 to 25 of 33, Search took 0.31 seconds;"

The new advanced isn't searching my posts in the Terrestrial forum for the word "conjunction" or any other word for that matter. It worked perfectly when the new advanced search first appeared but is useless now.

I get the same results if I input no data at all and click search [20,965,729 results (0.201 seconds)]. The information I input into the advanced search screen doesn't appear to be carried into the search when I click the search button. Why is this? I'm using IE9 on Windows Vista Home Premium if that matters.

Others appear to be having the same problem also, mike65 (post#3), copacetic (post#9) and lil_lisa (post#15) for example.

copacetic

just to back the above up,(and my earlier post which was ignored in the reply above) the search doesn't work. The results are consistently wrong.

Eg take conjunction which is the word of the moment above. A search for it, sorted by newest first doesn't return Davs or the cushs post above.

If you try to force the actual correct result by filtering by poster then you get neither the posters posts or ones with the word in it as results.


As I noted above also it appeared to work ok initially but there is some issue with indexing that appears to being ignored.

28064212

copacetic wrote: »

just to back the above up,(and my earlier post which was ignored in the reply above) the search doesn't work. The results are consistently wrong.

Eg take conjunction which is the word of the moment above. A search for it, sorted by newest first doesn't return Davs or the cushs post above.

The Feedback forum isn't searchable in the new search, not sure why though

The Cush wrote: »

Hi Dav

Just did a new advanced search for the word "conjunction" in my posts in the terrestrial forum and still got 20,965,564 results (0.098 seconds).

The old vBulletin search returned "Showing results 1 to 25 of 33, Search took 0.31 seconds;"

I did the same search in the new search (your username, terrestrial, conjunction), got 16 results.

The URL I get is: http://www.boards.ie/search/?q=conjunction&f=56&subforums=1&u=10144&title=&threads=&date_from=&date_to=&sort=newest

copacetic

28064212 wrote: »

The Feedback forum isn't searchable in the new search, not sure why though

Thanks for that, have seen same issues with other forums though just picked that word as it was mentioned in the thread.

(Feedback was hidden from front page results a while back, probably the reason it isn't searchable also)

The Cush

28064212 wrote: »

I did the same search in the new search (your username, terrestrial, conjunction), got 16 results.

The URL I get is: http://www.boards.ie/search/?q=conjunction&f=56&subforums=1&u=10144&title=&threads=&date_from=&date_to=&sort=newest

Odd indeed, just did the same search again and 20,967,389 results (0.662 seconds) (http://www.boards.ie/search/?q=&f=&subforums=&u=&title=&threads=&date_from=&date_to=&sort=newest). Information input on the advanced search screen is not being carried into the search for me and others. Why is this?

The old vBulletin search found 33 results, your search found only 16. Lets not get rid of the vBulletin search just yet.

28064212

The Cush wrote: »

Odd indeed, just did the same search again and 20,967,389 results (0.662 seconds) (http://www.boards.ie/search/?q=&f=&subforums=&u=&title=&threads=&date_from=&date_to=&sort=). Information input on the advanced search screen is not being carried into the search for me and others. Why is this?

Odd. Try in a different browser maybe? And try logged in and logged out.