IP Search

[markopolo2002]

I know I've raised this before, in particular with IPDownloads, but I really do need to figure if it's just me or is anyone else struggling to figure how the search system actually queries the dbase?. Over the past few months I've struggled to find things in our own IPDownloads section, although I know for a fact they are there. I know this may be better placed in the IPDownloads section, but I'm sure the search system is IPBoard based, rather than just IPDownloads based.

On a previous topic, I know Brandon explained it really isn't something that is easy to modify and I completely understand this, but the amount of irrelevant results from the search system makes it virtually impossible for people to find certain keywords. I could probably give a million examples but what I'm after for the moment is an understanding on how the search system works which may help me better understand the issue I'm describing.
Cheers all
Marko

[markopolo2002]

I now know that MySQL won't find anything with 3 letters or less which explains why I can't find the likes of "ISO" or "BIN" from a search. Maybe the issues I'm facing are because we're more focused on IPDownloads than IPBoard?. I will give a couple of examples of how certain search results just don't return what is expected.

In IPDownloads, I search for "google chrome", a pretty simple query I think, but it's not until we get to the 9th result that we find "google" in the title, then 12th position is "Google Chrome Portable". However, entering the 2nd page of results I now find that the 2 pages of results have now jumped to something like 14 pages of results with still no sign of "google chrome" - in fact we have to get to page 8 of the results for us to find "google chrome".

We now want to find "magic iso", so we enter "magic", nope, not found and we know we can't enter "ISO" because MySQL won't find it, users won't know this so will then basically just assume we have nothing listed for "ISO" and will most probably just stop searching. Searching "magic iso" returns nothing either, so we have to enter it exactly as it's found like "magiciso".

This is just the tip of the iceberg for the issues I've found, I know its very likely the search/MySQL is doing this by default and it's not necessarily an Invision issue but is there not a way to hopefully improve on the search queries or is MySQL due an upgrade/revamp at any point where we can possibly hope for such results to be improved upon?.

The reason I'm kinda struggling with this one is that other download sites which I presume are using MySQL also are able to return much better results for some reason, I know it's impossible to figure what they're doing that we aren't but they're obviously doing something!.
Cheers
Marko