HarryH Posted February 24, 2011 Share Posted February 24, 2011 The current search feature is incredibly frustrating. I would like users to be able to search the entire site using the search box. Unfortunately the search box will only search the area the user is currently viewing, and can only target searches at any one IP feature (Pages, Board, Calendar, etc.). I've been told that it could be a performance issue. That should be left up to me. Please develop a global search feature. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryan11433 Posted February 24, 2011 Share Posted February 24, 2011 is your board updated? if so try Sphinx Search feature, it is built in with IPB but requires a software to be installed on your server and the site is http://sphinxsearch.com/ to get the software because it process more quickly. Maybe that will get you happier. :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Royzee Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 Not only is the IPB search incredibly frustrating, IPB search is, and has always been, the most usless search I have ever run across. It is potentially a great effective search, but the default "Minimum search word length" setting, renders searching usless for specific searches. Say you want to do an exact phrase search for Michael's "Members Age in Topics" mod. On most forums you will get the error.One or all of your search keywords were below x characters or... So your stuck with seaching on "Members" and/or "Topics" alone which is about as broad as your search can be on a forum. I always set mine to 1 and my members can do a specific search that won't return an error or half the posts on the forum. However that doesn't help me or my members search on most IPB boards with a setting of 3 or 4. I realize there is a reason for the setting but it is far more trouble than it is worth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Collin S. Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 Not only is the IPB search incredibly frustrating, IPB search is, and has always been, the most usless search I have ever run across. It is potentially a great effective search, but the default "Minimum search word length" setting, renders searching usless for specific searches. Say you want to do an exact phrase search for Michael's "Members Age in Topics" mod. On most forums you will get the error. So your stuck with seaching on "Members" and/or "Topics" alone which is about as broad as your search can be on a forum. I always set mine to 1 and my members can do a specific search that won't return an error or half the posts on the forum. However that doesn't help me or my members search on most IPB boards with a setting of 3 or 4. I realize there is a reason for the setting but it is far more trouble than it is worth. Just so we are clear on something - That's not an IP.Board limit. It's a limit of MySQL, and unless you run your own server or use Sphinx, most users are not able to change it below 4. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/server-system-variables.html#sysvar_ft_min_word_len Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Royzee Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 Collin my apologies for disparaging IPS for MySQL limitations. That said I have had text length set to 1 for years, with ASO, BlueHost, HostGator shared, and now a 1&1 private server. So far I never have had a problem, nor have I had a complaint from members. Question. What effect does setting the length to 1 have search effectiveness? Skimming the links you provided left it unclear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Matt Posted February 25, 2011 Management Share Posted February 25, 2011 You increase the size of your full text indexes as it has to store every single word including words that it would consider stop words such as "a" and "at" etc. It's not a problem for smaller sites but once you get a lot of indexable content then you might see some performance issues. Either way, I would recommend Sphinx as it is a much better search engine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sound Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 yep like to see a global search would have thought sphinx could have handled this ok if not, even a number of results in each feature would be a help Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Posted February 25, 2011 Share Posted February 25, 2011 They tried something like that earlier, it is a resource nightmare. Everything that inserted new content had to also insert it into a separate table for searching, then it also had to store a way for that new table to effectively use permissions so people could only search for things they were allowed to see. It didn't work so well on this site, and so they had to change gears and create the current search system. Even if folks say they wanted that older system, that they had setups that could handle it, IPS can't include that in their default package because it would be a disaster for support. There would be people who thought they could handle the resource usage of it, but couldn't really, and support would have to pick up the pieces of any damage that might cause. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clickfinity Posted March 7, 2011 Share Posted March 7, 2011 Whilst we're talking about the search system - it would be great if, instead of presenting an "error" for short words, it would simply exclude them and notify the end user, IE:We've removed short and common words from your search "Chimps in the Jungle eat Bananas". Here are the results that include "Chimps, Jungle, Bananas". ... or something similar - the principle being that only searches that contain nothing practically searchable would return an error, IE:Error: Your seach for "eat a pie" contained too many short or common words. Please rephrase your search and try again. ... that sort of thing. I'm sure this could be done easily from a coding perspective and the end-user experience would be greatly improved by this small change (if this hasn't already been done for 3.2). Cheers, Shaun :D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SCS Posted March 16, 2011 Share Posted March 16, 2011 Whilst we're talking about the search system - it would be great if, instead of presenting an "error" for short words, it would simply exclude them and notify the end user, IE: We've removed short and common words from your search "Chimps in the Jungle eat Bananas". Here are the results that include "Chimps, Jungle, Bananas". ... or something similar - the principle being that only searches that contain nothing practically searchable would return an error, IE: Error: Your seach for "eat a pie" contained too many short or common words. Please rephrase your search and try again. ... that sort of thing. I'm sure this could be done easily from a coding perspective and the end-user experience would be greatly improved by this small change (if this hasn't already been done for 3.2). Cheers, Shaun :D Agreed. :) One thing I'd like to see implemented is allowing small words (those whose length is <= the minimum set on ACP) to be searchable in strings enclosed by quotes (this would not use full indexes though). E.g.: "sons of anarchy", "for loops", etc... I've modded my board to behave this way, but I'd like to have in native :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
growroom Posted March 18, 2011 Share Posted March 18, 2011 I would like this solution too... In my forum, users NEED to search lots of small "words" that are not the common ones... like "BHO" or "NPK" Perhaps the solution could be a list of small words that should not be ignored... Or vice versa (small words that should be ignored) This would resolve without the bad side of looking for unecessary words Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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