Simon Woods Posted December 19, 2016 Posted December 19, 2016 Just on the issue of search: http://www.theonion.com/article/websites-built-in-search-engine-just-pathetic-33203
Tracy Perry Posted December 20, 2016 Posted December 20, 2016 Well, most web sites will never be able to have a search feature comparable to Bing/Google. They have an entire infrastructure available to them for that - but there ARE drastic improvements that can be made even then. MySQL has been known to suck donkey gonads for a LONG time - and honestly it was one of the STUPIDEST moves that IPS made when the removed Sphinx without having an alternative in place. The "well, MySQL is good enough" is a cop out answer. It's good enough if you want a faecesty search engine - so to me it reflects that their attitude is that a faecesty search engine is fine for their script until the can deign to let the poor unwashed masses have something better. But XenForo is no different unless you want to purchase the add-on for ES. It's search sucks the same pair of donkey gonads.
KentT Posted December 20, 2016 Posted December 20, 2016 My site has +500,000 replies, +100,000 topics, and about 1500 Pages records in two different databases. The built-in search is worthless trying to deal with that volume of content. Seems the ability to seamlessly use Google or Bing search would be a priority, given other alternatives... Not only would it fill a gap in the product offering, it would also help the site owner's SEO efforts by repeatedly bringing the bots back to index new content...
Joel R Posted December 20, 2016 Posted December 20, 2016 3 hours ago, Tracy Perry said: Well, most web sites will never be able to have a search feature comparable to Bing/Google. They have an entire infrastructure available to them for that - but there ARE drastic improvements that can be made even then. MySQL has been known to suck donkey gonads for a LONG time - and honestly it was one of the STUPIDEST moves that IPS made when the removed Sphinx without having an alternative in place. The "well, MySQL is good enough" is a cop out answer. It's good enough if you want a faecesty search engine - so to me it reflects that their attitude is that a faecesty search engine is fine for their script until the can deign to let the poor unwashed masses have something better. But XenForo is no different unless you want to purchase the add-on for ES. It's search sucks the same pair of donkey gonads. How does XF price their ElasticSearch add-on? I don't mind paying for / investing into a good search solution if and when IPS can offer ES. The more I use the default IPS search both on my own community and in here in the IPS forums, the less I like it. You need to know the exact search words (eg. "content ratings" instead of "content rating"!) and you need to toggle with the options (search all words, search any words, etc.) until you can finetune the results, and I doubt any modern Internet user has the patience or tolerance to search like that. With that said, Quick Search by @onlyME is a highly recommended add-on for a really good price. It adds in live search and autocomplete, which makes the search feel much more responsive even when based upon the IPS default search. 3 hours ago, KentT said: Seems the ability to seamlessly use Google or Bing search would be a priority, given other alternatives... You can refer to the Google custom search engine integration by @DawPi
KentT Posted December 20, 2016 Posted December 20, 2016 11 minutes ago, Joel R said: You can refer to the Google custom search engine integration by @DawPi I've been watching that one -- but based on user feedback of having to uninstall it and reinstall it every time you perform an IPS update, I'm a bit reluctant to try it, at least yet..
Tracy Perry Posted December 21, 2016 Posted December 21, 2016 3 hours ago, Joel R said: How does XF price their ElasticSearch add-on? Their ES add-on is $50 initial cost and $10 a year renewal. They've always had it priced as a separate add-on AFAIK. IPS will have have issues if they try to do a "charge" for the add-on as they removed a fully functional Sphinx that was "core" and replaced it with nothing. If they attempt to charge for the new one many will consider it just an attempt to grab another revenue stream from their license holders (and I'll be one of those).
LiquidFractal Posted December 21, 2016 Posted December 21, 2016 Well, let's not forget that IPS search supports wildcard * searching. I'm not saying that IPS search doesn't need a serious overhaul and sophistication - it does - but in the meantime, perhaps some more immediate documentation for the naive user about how to use search (i.e. using wildcards) might be helpful?
KentT Posted December 21, 2016 Posted December 21, 2016 Simple example. My forums were converted to IPS in late September. My old forums are still running on MS SQL , just locked for new posts, as I make sure that I get all the add-on stuff moved over. Searching for the term "B-210" - a specific model of tractor - yields 38 matches on the old site, using MS SQL search. On IPS that same search finds NONE. I even tried it with quotes around it, still found None... How would you like to have a community dedicated to pickup trucks, but search won't find posts by searching for F-150 ...
Management Lindy Posted December 21, 2016 Management Posted December 21, 2016 1 hour ago, KentT said: Simple example. My forums were converted to IPS in late September. My old forums are still running on MS SQL , just locked for new posts, as I make sure that I get all the add-on stuff moved over. Searching for the term "B-210" - a specific model of tractor - yields 38 matches on the old site, using MS SQL search. On IPS that same search finds NONE. I even tried it with quotes around it, still found None... How would you like to have a community dedicated to pickup trucks, but search won't find posts by searching for F-150 ... If you can reproduce that, please send in a ticket. Thanks.
Simon Woods Posted December 21, 2016 Posted December 21, 2016 12 hours ago, Joel R said: With that said, Quick Search by @onlyME is a highly recommended add-on for a really good price. It adds in live search and autocomplete, which makes the search feel much more responsive even when based upon the IPS default search. Couldn't agree more. Quick Search has been given praise by even the least savvy members on my site; it has helped to reduce the stress of being confronted with what is now considered complex search. Also, it works with at least one other onlyME plugin (Topic Thumbnails) whilst onlyME has been providing great development and support of their work. An example: the latest update to Quick Search included filter integration, so you can apply the filter option from next to the search bar and the results in the drop-down refresh right there and then.
KentT Posted December 21, 2016 Posted December 21, 2016 8 hours ago, KentT said: Simple example. My forums were converted to IPS in late September. My old forums are still running on MS SQL , just locked for new posts, as I make sure that I get all the add-on stuff moved over. Searching for the term "B-210" - a specific model of tractor - yields 38 matches on the old site, using MS SQL search. On IPS that same search finds NONE. I even tried it with quotes around it, still found None... How would you like to have a community dedicated to pickup trucks, but search won't find posts by searching for F-150 ... @LindyDoing that now....
RevengeFNF Posted December 21, 2016 Posted December 21, 2016 12 hours ago, Lindy said: If you can reproduce that, please send in a ticket. Thanks. I searched for b-210 on this topic and it did not find anything.
Machsterdaemon Posted December 22, 2016 Posted December 22, 2016 I found b-210 on my localhost test site without using any search options. MariaDB 10.1 and InnoDB.
KentT Posted December 22, 2016 Posted December 22, 2016 5 hours ago, RevengeFNF said: I searched for b-210 on this topic and it did not find anything. My Support Ticket is categorized as Open. We'll see what happens...
Michael E Posted December 22, 2016 Posted December 22, 2016 I wanted to renew the license and upgrade for a while, invision's decision of not providing support for sphinx and overall slower ipb 4 vs ipb3 have been a showstopper for me.
KentT Posted December 23, 2016 Posted December 23, 2016 On 12/21/2016 at 1:13 AM, Lindy said: If you can reproduce that, please send in a ticket. Thanks. Just wanted to post the reply I received on my Support request on this issue. I suspected it was something like this, and that's what prompted me to search again using quotes around the "exact phrase" of B-210 but still got the same results (none).: Quote I'm Matt, one of the senior developers. IPS4 uses MySQL full text indexing to store and return search results. It's generally good at normal language, but it does really struggle with things like "B-210" because MySQL will see the hyphen as punctuation and split it to "B" and "210", both of which are below the threshold to store as a word in its index. This means that no results will be returned unfortunately. As this is a limitation of MySQL, there is no simple fix. To use different syntax for MySQL would be incredibly inefficient and not fit for purpose in a production environment. We are aware of these limitations and we are planning search improvements in the future. Kind Regards, Matt
Tracy Perry Posted December 24, 2016 Posted December 24, 2016 In other words, they know that MySQL search sucks, they know they removed a better search option (Sphinx) and they still are "planning search improvements somewhere in the (apparently far) future". Like I said earlier, it was a really stupid decision to make without already having something waiting in the wings. Kind of like not having a dev setup present to test with the latest "RC" releases of PHP. Just gets you a step or two ahead in the game.
StRiANON1 Posted September 17, 2017 Posted September 17, 2017 Almost the year passed - and so, what news we have with normal search engine usage for ipb? Nothing?
sudo Posted September 17, 2017 Posted September 17, 2017 11 minutes ago, StRiANON1 said: Almost the year passed - and so, what news we have with normal search engine usage for ipb? Nothing? 4.3 is rumoured to have changes to search.
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