nylyon Posted December 22, 2015 Share Posted December 22, 2015 Just an opinion on the Search functionality. I am sure that the removal of Sphinx was a decision which received a lot of thought, but the native search functionality is really deficient and something needs to be done. One of the primary purposes of a forum is the archival and retrieval of unstructured data. Because it's unstructured, the search function plays a primary role in the retrieval of information based on criteria. I won't pretend to know the challenges of implementing a robust search, however in my simplistic opinion I should be able to search for something like "IPS 4.1.6 beta" which is the exact topic title and see at very minimum that topic because it's an exact match. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaeitee Posted December 22, 2015 Share Posted December 22, 2015 The new "Advanced Search" layout is more confusing than the previous. Search is one of the very few areas that IPS is taking steps backwards rather than forwards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eGullet Posted December 22, 2015 Share Posted December 22, 2015 The reality is that searching is very hard to do well. MySQL fulltext searching is very poor, but Sphinx requires a server and maintenance of code linking to it. Plus, if you want to take advantage of all of the features Sphinx offers you have to actually code them into your interface. Although Invision nominally supported Sphinx in previous versions, they never exposed the real strengths of Sphinx, and only used it as a faster, more efficient alternative to Fulltext, but with the same feature set. This has to do a lot with their clientele, most of whom don't need a particularly powerful search engine because they aren't housing information, they are simply discussing things "in the moment." Some of us, however, see one of our primary purposes as the archival and retrieval of information! So we seek other solutions. In 4.1 we've found that using a Google Custom Search Engine gives us the highest quality results (after all, Google seems to know what they are doing when it comes to search!), with the major caveat that the returned results are paginated, and you don't get linked directly to individual posts. We considered this to be an acceptable tradeoff. DawPi developed an excellent plugin for us that integrates the CSE directly into the normal interface, so it is totally non-intrusive to my members. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
openfire Posted December 22, 2015 Share Posted December 22, 2015 I rarely bother using the search function on this site, as it's usually an exercise in frustration at best, futility at worst. This has been brought up many, many times in the past, but it appears not much (if anything) has been done to address it... not sure why they don't view this as a top priority. Alas, I use the following to search on this site: google.com -> site:invisionpower.com "search string" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shariq Ansari Posted December 22, 2015 Share Posted December 22, 2015 IPS had a pretty loooooong time to get search right, back when they were re-architecting things from scratch for 4.x. It didn't pan out - clearly.... Time to fall back ten & punt... it'd be nice to get an official acknowledgement that plans have failed, and what's being done to address that failure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eGullet Posted December 22, 2015 Share Posted December 22, 2015 5 minutes ago, djpretzel said: IPS had a pretty loooooong time to get search right, back when they were re-architecting things from scratch for 4.x. Rumor has it they had a few other things the were working on during that upgrade What would "right" look like? Sphinx, for example, is actually a very large, complex piece of software on its own. We can't really expect Invision to develop something like that. Search is hard! Invision isn't going to be able to just snap their fingers and get it done right: ideally, they need to outsource it, the same way they outsourced the editor. The trouble is, who do you outsource to? Invision believes, probably correctly, that the majority of their user base doesn't need anything more advanced than fulltext. I'd happily pay thousands of dollars for an effective solution, but there's no one to give the money to! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Matt Posted December 23, 2015 Management Share Posted December 23, 2015 Thousands of dollars you say..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eGullet Posted December 24, 2015 Share Posted December 24, 2015 I also said I thought you should outsource it If you can do it properly for a few thousand, PM me... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcdesign Posted December 25, 2015 Share Posted December 25, 2015 I got over 11 000 files in Downloads and the search is very bad. Why did ips 3.4 found everything but not the latest version. This is not good at all. I can not find my own files, this is crazy! Bring back a better search because about over 300 files is not found because they have name like: Joe, little, man, big, saw, her, p2, I want an admin answer to this. This must be 1:st priority. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcdesign Posted January 3, 2016 Share Posted January 3, 2016 I can confirmed that It was MySQL that stopped word and fulltext search. My host helped me and all word are now found in search. 1: open my.ini file in mysql 2: place below two line after [mysqld] line in my.ini (search [mysqld] in file) ft_min_word_len=2 ft_stopword_file="" 3: restart your server 4: repair your table using below command > repair table tablename; Rebuild search index in IPS4 Run support to cache. 5: now your search is working.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SJ77 Posted January 4, 2016 Share Posted January 4, 2016 I've observed search to be very poor as well. I hope it works better in the future Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Lindy Posted January 5, 2016 Management Share Posted January 5, 2016 The stopword and character limitation are not IPS-specific... it requires a mysql config edit -- please see above. 10 hours ago, superj707 said: I've observed search to be very poor as well. I hope it works better in the future Could you please be more specific? "Poor" isn't actionable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SJ77 Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 29 minutes ago, Lindy said: The stopword and character limitation are not IPS-specific... it requires a mysql config edit -- please see above. Could you please be more specific? "Poor" isn't actionable. I am sorry, I didn't mean to be ambiguous. I am having many if not all of the aforementioned issues. For example I cannot find thread titles even if I use the specific title of the thread in the search. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Lindy Posted January 5, 2016 Management Share Posted January 5, 2016 10 minutes ago, superj707 said: I am sorry, I didn't mean to be ambiguous. I am having many if not all of the aforementioned issues. For example I cannot find thread titles even if I use the specific title of the thread in the search. If you wouldn't mind, please submit a ticket with a few specific examples/steps to produce. We'd like to take a look and see if there's a bug. There was an issue, for example, with punctuation in topic titles. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SJ77 Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 7 minutes ago, Lindy said: If you wouldn't mind, please submit a ticket with a few specific examples/steps to produce. We'd like to take a look and see if there's a bug. There was an issue, for example, with punctuation in topic titles. I sure will.. right now my upgrade to 4.1.6 failed so I am thinking about starting a ticket for that first. Thanks again Lindy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BN_IT_Support Posted January 5, 2016 Share Posted January 5, 2016 I'm still at a loss to understand why the search doesn't cover pages content. Could you explain why this is and if there are plans to change it please? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SJ77 Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 Okay, finally getting around to posting some examples. Tag "welcome" clearly exists search for "welcome" tag produces nothing. Thread title clearly exists Search produces nothing I can still submit a ticket but I don't think its a specific to my site error. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Lindy Posted January 28, 2016 Management Share Posted January 28, 2016 On 1/5/2016 at 3:05 AM, Edward Shephard said: I'm still at a loss to understand why the search doesn't cover pages content. Could you explain why this is and if there are plans to change it please? Could you please be more specific? Pages content such as databases are quite searchable. 10 minutes ago, superj707 said: Okay, finally getting around to posting some examples. Tag "welcome" clearly exists search for "welcome" tag produces nothing. Thread title clearly exists Search produces nothing I can still submit a ticket but I don't think its a specific to my site error. Yes, please do submit a ticket and mention I asked you to do so. If it's specific to your site, we can let you know and why. If it's something in the software, we can address it globally. As a note though, it appears based on your screenshot, you're not searching for tags. You either need to click the tag, or on the search screen, click "Search by tags" We're happy to look into the second issue for you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SJ77 Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 Thank you Lindy, .. I am pretty sure I clicked search by tags. I might be making a mistake or something but I checked it 3 times. Thanks again. I will submit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Management Lindy Posted January 28, 2016 Management Share Posted January 28, 2016 Just now, superj707 said: Thank you Lindy, .. I am pretty sure I clicked search by tags. I might be making a mistake or something but I checked it 3 times. Thanks again. I will submit A good indication is the lack of "tags" in the screenshot. This is what it would look like if you did search by tags: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SJ77 Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 weird mine is different Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koby Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 How do you even search the member list anymore? When I try it tells me I have to input a search term, but if I put any sort of term in then it'd limit the results and I'm just trying to get to the full member list. o.o A few versions back this was possible, but now it has to have a search term it seems. :/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chilihead Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 15 minutes ago, Koby said: How do you even search the member list anymore? When I try it tells me I have to input a search term, but if I put any sort of term in then it'd limit the results and I'm just trying to get to the full member list. o.o A few versions back this was possible, but now it has to have a search term it seems. :/ That issue is supposed to be fixed in 4.1.8. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BN_IT_Support Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 6 hours ago, Lindy said: Could you please be more specific? Pages content such as databases are quite searchable. As per your guide here: If you embed a database on a page then that is all fine and searchable. However if you make a basic html page in the acp then even the basic html content isn't indexed by the site and the same goes for the new wysiwyg content blocks that you can add from the front-end. So on my test site I built a basic homepage which had a page title loaded automatically from the acp and wysiwyg block of content. Net result is that none of my homepage is indexed or searchable using the built-in search engine, which for myself at least is a significant weakness for V4. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shariq Ansari Posted January 28, 2016 Share Posted January 28, 2016 On 1/5/2016 at 0:23 AM, Lindy said: The stopword and character limitation are not IPS-specific... it requires a mysql config edit -- please see above. Could you please be more specific? "Poor" isn't actionable. @Lindy Apologies if my post elsewhere was off-topic, but this seems like the right place: You can't search for all posts by a specific person in a specific forum...you HAVE to put a search term You can't limit forum search by subforum in Advanced Search. There are like 4 filtering options in advanced search. These two come directly from end users & moderators... This is another instance where functionality in IPB 3.X was nerfed and still hasn't been restored (e.g. http://theshizz.org/forum/index.php?app=core&module=search&search_in=forums - the "find in forum" options at the bottom... where'd they go?) Is making MySQL 5.6+ a requirement an option, so fulltext for innodb can be assumed, so we can get back the functionality we had? Is anything in the works? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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