Improving forum Search?

[oos143]

Is there any way to improve the search capabilities of this forum?? as a noob...its really sucks 

[rasgar]

I 2nd that. I can put in a very detalied search and get a response that my search was too general. ?!?!

I always thought SMF was supposed to be one of the best forums for search.

[oos143]

*whew* glad someone agreed with me.  Over on mambo...their search stuff is pretty robust.  Luckily alot of the robelms are common for both:D so it saves me some grief.

When things diverge...i gonna be pulling my hair out of my head. 

[brad]

Is there any way to improve the search capabilities of this forum?? as a noob...its really sucks 

Can you be more specific...

I have a vacuum cleaner that sucks as well, but telling you that is not very helpful

[oos143]

search turns up IRRELEVANT material.

I dunno...how much more specific?

[brad]

Can you give me an example? What are you trying to search for?

[romit]

Brad,
I think the search feature is really cool,
but what I found one thing to be lacking in the forum search.

It is that there is no feature to highlight the text that is being searched, in the actual page
The highlight feature in the search result is great but,
when going to the actual page you can't makeout which one is useless and which one is the important stuff you need,

To get the actual stuff we have to undertake another human search through the whole page which are sometimes outrageously large .

Another thing that I would like to add is that there needs to be a cancel button in the posting thingy,
apart from the post, preview and spell check,
I know that this could easily be avoided by using the Back button in the browser,
but the Cancel button would be really helpfull, anyway

Cheers
Romit

[benedikt]

To get the actual stuff we have to undertake another human search through the whole page which are sometimes outrageously large

I think you can avoid this.
In the search results you can also click on the title of post that contains your search term.
That way you don't have to search the whole tread.

btw: the search function works fine for me

[DeanMarshall]

I've got to admit I have hit the occassional frustration with the forum search.
I think that there is one slight issue: a search that returns no results tells you to be more specific.
It should actually tell you to be less specific or more general.

Here is one example:

Search for:
MySQL
match all words
post by: DeanMarshall

where is any unlikely word - I used the fellow who spins gold and asks for your firstborn
unless you guess his name - be creative and make up your own unlikely word.

I have never made a post that includes the unlikely-word but I was told
"Your query was not specific enough. Try using larger words, or less common phrases."

Dean

[brad]

I might generate a custom index for the forums to see if it makes a difference... we have a huge forum now... over 220k posts... searching is very important, but so is server loads...

Let me see what I can do.. will report back

[brad]

Please try the search now... I have generated a new custom index.. twice the siz of the last one.. Awaiting your feedback.

[DeanMarshall]

Hi Brad,

For searches have results it feels faster - although a sample size of 4 is by no means statistsically 'significant'.

But, (you knew there was going to be a but - right) searches with no results - where no matches exist - still tell the enquirer to be more specific, whereas the message should tell them to be more vague or general, by removing keywords or quotes from phrases.

Dean.

[brad]

The bigger index *should* be faster... will see what others have to say.. thanks for your input.

[brian]

The search seems to be working better. I just tried with some of the queries I had used in the lats few days that resulted in no matches or that please be more specific message and they all found the things I was looking for

Brian

[DeanMarshall]

I agree search seems better - but on a purely qualitative level (ie no data to back it up) the forum as a whole feels a little sluggish - of course this could just be me imagining things or it could be my connection.

Dean.

[perandre]

I have to agree that I see this phrase a bit too often: "Your query was not specific enough. Try using larger words, or less common phrases."

I did a search for "convert frontpage articles gone", and I got "Your query was not..."
I do it again, and I get No results. One more time, and I get "Your query was not..." 

It does function better than some days ago, but still I would think that it could be tweaked to work even better?

[Ben_S]

The "Your query was not specific enough. Try using larger words, or less common phrases." is a bug in 1.1 RC2, it uses the same error message for no results found as it does for too many results found.