Search function in marketplace terrible...

[openfire]

I find that whenever I search the marketplace for a mod that I know exists, the results are terrible and often don't include the mod/skin/product I'm looking for. Has anyone else noticed this?

[Michael]

Yes, and it's been reported a lot. Searching in general in IP.Board and its related apps is a major pain point for a lot of folks.

[lordi]

agreed, search function in marketplace is horrible

[TracyIsland]

agreed. the search function in marketplace is almost useless. let's get everyone to post similar replies like @lordi until IPS management gets the message and indicates they will stop all development and issue an immediate fix, called ipb 3.4.6, that addresses the poor search functiion in the Marketplace!

[Rhett]

This actually works pretty well now, however it will improve again I'm sure on 4.x. It was improved upon a few months back, what is it you are searching for?

Do you have some examples?

[TracyIsland]

Hi Rhett:

I'll just go through my list of hooks and pretend I am looking for the file:

#1 - Where are you from? [this is InvisionHQ's paid file]

result: No results found for 'where are you from?'.

#2 - Adriano's great file, Go to Top in Posts. If you search by Go To Top, the search results are nothing found for "Top," and if you search for Go To Top in Posts, you get a long page of files but .... nothing that shows Adriano's file

Only two miscues ... but that is also not supporting your assertion that the search is wonderful. If I search by one or two words and do not have the luxury of seeing the hook file name at my fingertips, the results are far from revealing.

Brian

[openfire]

This actually works pretty well now, however it will improve again I'm sure on 4.x. It was improved upon a few months back, what is it you are searching for?

Do you have some examples?

Yes I do. Here's one random example:

I was looking in the marketplace for the mod by Dawpi "(DP32) Account Switch 1.0.2"

I had forgotten the exact name of the mod, so I typed in "switch accounts" (without the quotes). The results page yielded only one result, "linked accounts" by adriano faria, which was not the mod I was looking for.

In my opinion, a search for "switch accounts" should bring up a mod called "account switch", would you not agree?

[Rhett]

Hi Rhett:

I'll just go through my list of hooks and pretend I am looking for the file:

#1 - Where are you from? [this is InvisionHQ's paid file]

result: No results found for 'where are you from?'.

#2 - Adriano's great file, Go to Top in Posts. If you search by Go To Top, the search results are nothing found for "Top," and if you search for Go To Top in Posts, you get a long page of files but .... nothing that shows Adriano's file

Only two miscues ... but that is also not supporting your assertion that the search is wonderful. If I search by one or two words and do not have the luxury of seeing the hook file name at my fingertips, the results are far from revealing.

Brian

Hello, on both of those examples it's hitting a limitation of mysql search... meaning that searching for three letters or less is not going to return any results.

Where are you from - the only thing it's going to match is the words "where" and "from" which is going to be a tough search really.

Go to Top in Posts - Same here but less, only the word "Post" would be searching and that is not going to produce much either.

I'm sure when Brandon sees this topic he can expand, however that's the short version.

[Rhett]

Yes I do. Here's one random example:

I was looking in the marketplace for the mod by Dawpi "(DP32) Account Switch 1.0.2"

I had forgotten the exact name of the mod, so I typed in "switch accounts" (without the quotes). The results page yielded only one result, "linked accounts" by adriano faria, which was not the mod I was looking for.

In my opinion, a search for "switch accounts" should bring up a mod called "account switch", would you not agree?

thanks for the info, this may help improves things in the future, as I would agree it should pick up both of those words.... the only item may be "account vs accounts. :) Thank you

[bfarber]

Hello, on both of those examples it's hitting a limitation of mysql search... meaning that searching for three letters or less is not going to return any results.

Where are you from - the only thing it's going to match is the words "where" and "from" which is going to be a tough search really.

Go to Top in Posts - Same here but less, only the word "Post" would be searching and that is not going to produce much either.

I'm sure when Brandon sees this topic he can expand, however that's the short version.

Rhett is absolutely correct here. MySQL's fulltext searching by default only supports 4 letters and above. It has been that way since forever and requires server-side changes to adjust, as well as rebuilding the fulltext indexes afterwards. Unfortunately this is simply a limitation outside of our control at this time (aside from using Sphinx, which we have opted not to do on our company forums).

I would agree "switch accounts" should bring up "account switch", although I think the problem here is probably more subtle than you realize. The word is "account" not "accounts". If you search for "switch account" it actually does bring up the addon you were looking for - again, this all comes down to MySQL having really crappy search support and there is little that can be done about this. MySQL does not inherently understand pluralization and word stemming (complex search subjects that good solutions take into account) so if you add an 's' to the word MySQL simply doesn't understand that it's the same thing.

We are going to look into some possible ways to account for this in 4.0, but it's challenging because doing things like simply stripping any trailing 's' doesn't work for other languages, so it's not a complete solution by any means.

[Ryan H.]

How about soundex and the likes?

[Dmacleo]

I have said before if you are going to keep using mysql then the mods themselves need to be named in a manner that allows searching for them.

I use google to search the market now.

[TracyIsland]

I have said before if you are going to keep using mysql then the mods themselves need to be named in a manner that allows searching for them.

I use google to search the market now.

Aha, the black cat saunters in with another dead mouse. If you want to get something done, get a big black cat.

So how difficult would it be to simply change the search function/search field for the Marketplace to use Google? It's just a simple, common sense approach that serves the end line consumer.

Brian

[Dmacleo]

not sure if direct implementation of google (instead of sphinx) is the best way, actually never really thought about that, its just what I do to get around the built in fail here.

I understand them not using sphinx as some shared hosts won't install it (one I had used for years was glad to) but at least that is a supported built in method.

[bfarber]

How about soundex and the likes?

I've tested SOUNDEX with IP.Downloads in the past (in fact, I seem to recall that the very first versions of IP.Downloads supported this out of the box though I could be wrong) and it simply returned too many irrelevant results. Additionally, it was resource intensive when you have a large database. I can concede it is possible that things have changed since then (that was many years ago), and we will investigate it for 4.0, but I don't have high hopes in all honesty.

Aha, the black cat saunters in with another dead mouse. If you want to get something done, get a big black cat.

So how difficult would it be to simply change the search function/search field for the Marketplace to use Google? It's just a simple, common sense approach that serves the end line consumer.

Brian

We can't build in Google support out of the box due to the various ability to filter in the search results, and the need to support permissions (admins can see categories members can't and so on). You are certainly free to use Google on *our* site if you wish.

MySQL really just isn't all that great at searching. We're looking into ways we can improve this with 4.0, but there is a wall you eventually hit that cannot be overcome without a more powerful backend search engine.