Feedback on Search :-)

[Brandon D]

Thanks for the improvements on the search in 3.1, however I think there is room for more. I initially made a bug report about one of them, but after realizing it was due to my browser's cache it quickly turned into feedback, so I'm heading off the "post in the feedback forum" with a little preemptive topic here :D

1. I see post snippets have gone in search results -- now we are forced to use the topic preview to get the snippet. While topic preview is nice in the forum view, I think it's counter productive in search results, where the entire point of being there is finding a post. I'd like to see the snippets return so I do not have to click each topic preview and wait for an AJAX request to return an (irrelevant -- see #2) post snippet.

2. Post snippets that were returned on 3.0.x and those returned in the topic preview now are irrelevant to the search. On 3.0.x the snippet returned rarely contained the keywords searched for. On 3.1 it just simply returns the first and last posts of the topic, like the topic preview works on the forum listing. I'd like to see it return x characters before and after the keyword(s) searched for.

3. Search keywords aren't being highlighted when you click on a search result.

Again, thanks for the improvements already made, though. I love the new context based search and the new advanced search forum. I've also noticed searching has rather speeded up :-D

[Charles]

Will let Matt properly comment (as there might be technical reasons) but those seem like reasonable suggestions :)

[Matt]

Mr D,

1) Post snippets are 'hard' to fit into the "list of topics" format. We wanted to closely emulate a forum-like view and it's difficult to know where to put three or four lines of a post without squishing it into a column or making each topic entry 'taller'.

2) I agree. It was one of those things floating around in my head that I haven't gotten around to. I will see if I get time to add this in.

3) That would be a bug, sir. I'll see if there's a report and if not, I'll pretend it's not a bug.

[Brandon D]

I hope you reconsider the post snippets and not remove them based on aesthetics. I like the topic preview in the forum listing because it adds functionality that previously wasn't there, but with search results I think you've taken a step backwards by removing a crucial piece of information to be handled by an already controversial feature. I don't know if I just have weird search habits, but I typically found myself reading post snippets to find the relevant post when I searched on 3.0.x...