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Still no "Only search in titles" option


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If people were to go through the drama of converting their software over a tiny tiny thing like topic title search limiting then I'm sure they could find bigger things to worry about ;)

If users really do find it difficult we will certainly implement a solution.​

Charles, but you need to avoid that. Users should never find it difficult in the first place.

Its seems you are doing something like this: "Lets try this, if they don't like it, we'll change."

Even Microsoft, that is one of the biggest companys in the world, have changed the "Alwasy Online" in Xbox One before the official release. They did not waited till the released to see what would happen.

Its only my opinion. Cheers.

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If people were to go through the drama of converting their software over a tiny tiny thing like topic title search limiting then I'm sure they could find bigger things to worry about ;)

If users really do find it difficult we will certainly implement a solution.

​It's "tiny tiny" to you. Was this a personal decision which is why you're sticking so adamantly to it and trying to demean the feedback from multiple forum owners who run actual forums?

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Nobody is being adamant or trying to demean feedback. There is a big difference between saying "I personally disagree" and "You're stupid, we're sticking to doing it this way" and nobody is saying the latter :)

Of course during betas we do things to see the feedback we'll get. That's why we put pre-release software on our feedback forums, because we want to hear what you have to say.

 

I have to say, I'm more confused than anything. Let's say I'm on a forum about phones because I want to get people's opinions about iPhone vs Android (silly example I know because the answer is of course iPhone ;)) - I'd type into the search box "iPhone vs Android". I don't care if that's the title of a topic which could be anything - I just want topics which match that phrase. So in what circumstance would I use the "titles only" option? Are you thinking about when you already have viewed a particular topic/whatever and are trying to find it again? I guess if I was trying to find a particular modification on the Marketplace here I might use the option, but I just a quick test for popular modifications and for all of them the term I searched for was in the title on the top results because the system is clever like that.

I guess an example would help us understand here. In 3.x we needed a titles only option because the search engine couldn't handle both at once. In 4.0, the new backend (which utilises a search index) can do both simultaneously and is good at getting the relevant results.

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;)

In 4.0, the new backend (which utilises a search index) can do both simultaneously and is good at getting the relevant results.

​ps: I can't delete this emoticons using backspace on phone! :o Back t

o topic, how relevant results works exacly? Right now if you search for Shoutbox in Files, it will appear on  11th position. There are 10 files first with less downloads, less views, less rates, etc.  EDIT: I give up of this editor on phone.

 

 

 

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​ps: I can't delete this emoticons using backspace on phone! :o Back t

o topic, how relevant results works exacly? Right now if you search for Shoutbox in Files, it will appear on  11th position. There are 10 files first with less downloads, less views, less rates, etc.  EDIT: I give up of this editor on phone.

 

 

 

​Most of them have "Shoutbox" in the title though, so a "titles only" option would have very little effect on that result set.

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I guess an example would help us understand here. In 3.x we needed a titles only option because the search engine couldn't handle both at once. In 4.0, the new backend (which utilises a search index) can do both simultaneously and is good at getting the relevant results.

​What if I only want to find topics with a certain phrase in the title then?

It's going to take longer to find it if I've to filter through no end of posts containing that same phrase.

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I'll give you an example. Say someone wanted to find a topic from years back, some guy on here created it and they agreed with it so much (can't blame them really) and yet that feature has still been ignored. This is the topic - http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/347655-forum-jump/

and all they can remember is the title, forum jump. So we'll search that. And here is the result. http://community.invisionpower.com/search/?term=forum+jump&type=forums_topic

Now, where is that topic? I've tried it on OR and AND terms and it's not on the first page, not on the second, not on the third.. gave up. If we had search by titles, it would be found. 

So can someone explain, how I would find that topic?

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I'm surprised you cannot see why this feature would be used.

If i want to search for a specific model of phone or car for example its because i would like to find a topic on that item! Not a specific post which may have mentioned the phrase i searched for.

The last thing I want to do it scroll through an endless list of individual posts going backwards and forwards to the search results.

Fair enough if you search for the term in the title and no topics exists, then i would start sifting through the individual posts.

I'm sick and tired of a search on IPB returning useless results as it is, let alone without any control of what may be contained in the results. It's so frustrating when you know a topic or marketplace item exists, and you cannot find it! God help you if you don't know it exists.

If you really can't see a use for it then why have you included the option in the last 10 years of the software? I'm not one to have a moan at IPS but the attitude of "why would you even need that?" has really surprised me.

 

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​What if I only want to find topics with a certain phrase in the title then?

It's going to take longer to find it if I've to filter through no end of posts containing that same phrase.

​Yes as I've said multiple times we can (I think!) all agree that Google are king of search and even they provide the tool to search just in page titles. Why are IPS keen to drop this? That's what's confusing...

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For me as admin and for moderators to, search titles only help us find topics with similar titles / duplicate titles.

In IPS4 I can not find topics with duplicate titles, at least I can not find topics that contain a certain keyword, because I get results that do not contain the keyword în titles.

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I can give an example from ten seconds ago on this forum. The word "constants.php" appears in about ten zillion discussion topics. I am only interested in discussions that are specifically about constants.php, not just places where it is mentioned incidentally, even if it's mentioned incidentally a lot! A search by topic title is like saying "I want topics about this specific thing", as opposed to "I want topics where this thing came up from time to time".

Our forum is about food, so another example that comes up a lot is ingredients. If I do a search for "king arthur flour" and let it search topic text, I get a bazillion hits where KAF gets mentioned, often repeatedly, but aren't actually about the flour, it's just in an ingredient list. If I do a title-only search I get topics that are entirely devoted to a discussion of that specific flour brand.

Now, maybe the new search engine has some crazy voodoo under the hood and the titles are weighted heavily, etc. But at least in the case of my search here for constants.php I came up empty-handed.

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Here's another real life example.

I am trying to find topics on how to use my own css in IP.Content blocks.   I searched for "content css block" (without the quotes).  I cannot specify titles only nor can I say I only want results that contain all the words.

How many posts do we have in this board that contain either of these words and yet have absolutely nothing to do with what I am looking for ?.   The 4th result is a topic titled "SQL Error upgrading from 3.2.3 to 3.3".  That does not remotely relate to my search.   I would much rather search on titles and be told nothing relevant was found than have to filter nearly 3000 results to see if maybe one of them gives me something.

Sriously, I don't mean to be rude but ever since this board was moved to IPB 4 the search has been useless to me.   It gives so many unrelated results, it's faster (not to be confused with "fast") to just go to the specific forum, like IP.Content in this case, and browse through pages and page and pages of topic titles until I find one that seems to be talking about what I need.

 

 

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I just saw this topic for the first time, and then I went and took a look at the advanced search page.  

I'd like to chime in that I use "Only search in titles" VERY OFTEN on my forum.  I have over three million posts on my forum, and sometimes I need to find a specific topic, versus wading through potentially hundreds (or thousands) of posts looking for that one bit of information I need.  Many times, the term or terms I'm looking for may occur very frequently in posts, but less often in the titles.  Being able to search only the titles gives me a much smaller result set to help narrow down my search.  This works especially well when the topic starter has put some thought into their title.

Please do not dumb down the search system.  Comparing the 4.0 advanced search page with the 3.4.x advanced search page, I can see that several options have been removed.  I've stated this before and I will state it again.  Being able to search and find content on a forum is a critically important feature.  Please do not dumb down the advanced search because you feel it's not worthwhile.  The better the advanced search tools are in helping me (and others) narrow down the results, the faster I can find what I'm looking for.  

I need to install Beta 6 of this software on a copy of my existing forum and do some search tests side-by-side.  I will not upgrade to 4.0 if the search system is noticeably worse.

 ..Al

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I cannot specify titles only nor can I say I only want results that contain all the words.

​Yeah, I noticed that as well, which is disappointing.  This is an advanced search page.  It should have advanced options.  If I know the topic or post I'm looking for contains specific words, I ONLY want results that contain all of those words.  Otherwise the potential results can be staggeringly large, potentially making the results useless.

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​Is this a confirmation that you are going to do it ?  :)

 

​As usual we are looking at a whole lot more than this ;)

While the focus in this topic is all about one very specific, very narrow item there is a whole lot more going on. We are not going to just slap a change in without considering a broader scope.

The search system in 4.0 is much more technically proficient than in 3.x. It also works very differently: so step 1 was to implement the new technology and now step 2 is to evaluate how we are using it. Obviously it has taken some real-world use to learn how best to implement things. As you can imagine, searching for "test" over and over on a staging site doesn't really give you a good feel for the best way to handle search :).

 

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Try moving a few hundred, or even, say 30,000 topics (yes, we did that recently) without having the ability to ONLY look in titles. It took long enough. Think how long that would have taken if we only could check all text?

 

Yes, this is a good point--when creating a new forum I often have to mass move relevant topics into the newly created forum.  During operations such as this, I'm primarily doing searches on titles to find the bulk of the topics I want to move. 

 ..Al

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​As usual we are looking at a whole lot more than this ;)

While the focus in this topic is all about one very specific, very narrow item there is a whole lot more going on. We are not going to just slap a change in without considering a broader scope.

The search system in 4.0 is much more technically proficient than in 3.x. It also works very differently: so step 1 was to implement the new technology and now step 2 is to evaluate how we are using it. Obviously it has taken some real-world use to learn how best to implement things. As you can imagine, searching for "test" over and over on a staging site doesn't really give you a good feel for the best way to handle search :).

 

​I have already indicated (to Daniel) that I'll gladly provide a copy of my live site for you to test things on. I will be testing the IPS 4 upgrade on such a copy anyway. I finished the script yesterday to make it run on a different site without human interference other than running the script (after copying the site across), to the point it automatically changes all paths, urls, license codes, etc., and a few more items. Will start testing my latest changes tomorrow very likely.

We are talking 90,000 members here, 3 million+ posts, and the rest, so a little bit bigger than a standard staging site. :)

In addition, this is a site that has been upgraded from 1.1 to 1.3 and on through every next upgrade step, with all the added problems that brings with it. Great test database if you ask me.

Kind regards, Wim

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Yes, this is a good point--when creating a new forum I often have to mass move relevant topics into the newly created forum.  During operations such as this, I'm primarily doing searches on titles to find the bulk of the topics I want to move.

 ..Al

​Looks like my original post was hidden or removed....

Really great. Not. I know I complained about something else too, but if this is what is going to happen more often, I'd really like to hear about it in person.

Edit: it is back.

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We are certainly willing to add a "only search in titles" option. Some of you seem to think we are dead-set against it :)

​That's great @Charles - I think this thread has attracted a lot more feedback from a wider variety of forum owners than many of the other discussions about IPS 3 features which have been removed for v4. Glad to see it wasn't in vain - you may some days get fed up with us but we only spend this much time giving feedback because we truly care about IPB :)

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