AmericanRev2 Posted July 22, 2019 Posted July 22, 2019 how can i search for something in the search box here like an add-on and not find it but if i google the name of the add-on i can find it? How is google search better at searching this site then this sites own search? Can you add google search bar on this site so i don't have to keep going back to google to find something here?
coert_g Posted July 23, 2019 Posted July 23, 2019 Funny you should post this - I just came here to echo the same sentiments. Our site users have stated the same, we have to deal with constant negative feedback about how awful the site search is. They aren't able to find what they are looking for - they end up going to Google in order to find the pages on the site. Not sure how this hasn't been fixed yet, the search has been sub-par for years and just never seems to get resolved. There is no way for us to justify to our users why Google does a better job at providing relevant results than our own on-site search. This is especially the case when users are searching for strings inside of text bodies on forum posts for example. The search results just make little sense in the way they are processed and served. It's getting really difficult to justify our decision in CMS choice when asked why it's so difficult to find anything on our 4 Million post forums.
Management Matt Posted July 23, 2019 Management Posted July 23, 2019 Have you guys tried our Elastic Search integration?
jair101 Posted July 23, 2019 Posted July 23, 2019 1 hour ago, Matt said: Have you guys tried our Elastic Search integration? By the way, @Matt. The search engine here has been quite a disaster lately. I meant to collect some examples, but you can start with a very simple one: Search by: search work (no quotes, no AND between them). Naturally, this topic is is the first 3 results - fair enough. However, the quality of the search results drastically declines after that. It seems that it shows results from either "search" or "work", but not both. Fair enough, repeat the same search with: search AND work , now it seems the most prominent found word is "and", which I believe should be ignored. For example this comes as a number 2 result: There is no "work" anywhere in this topic.
Management Matt Posted July 23, 2019 Management Posted July 23, 2019 You're bypassing the hints underneath the search box. There's a link to search 'word' AND 'word'. It uses "or" by default. You can choose the default AND/OR search in the ACP. Try this: https://invisioncommunity.com/search/?q=search work&updated_after=any&sortby=relevancy&search_and_or=and
Adriano Faria Posted July 23, 2019 Posted July 23, 2019 We got that but it’s weird. If I search for RAFFLES SYSTEM, for example, in Downloads only, I’ll see it in the 8th place of results. That doesn’t make much sense. Maybe add theses options (AND & OR) in the form because the way it is I need to use search twice to get what I want: one with OR which results in 8th place and click on a link to rum the search again to use AND.
Management Matt Posted July 23, 2019 Management Posted July 23, 2019 1 minute ago, Adriano Faria said: We got that but it’s weird. If I search for RAFFLES SYSTEM, for example, in Downloads only, I’ll see it in the 8th place of results. That doesn’t make much sense. Maybe add theses options (AND & OR) in the form because the way it is I need to use search twice to get what I want: one with OR which results in 8th place and click on a link to rum the search again to use AND. This works https://invisioncommunity.com/search/?q=RAFFLES SYSTEM&updated_after=any&sortby=relevancy&search_and_or=and
Management Matt Posted July 23, 2019 Management Posted July 23, 2019 You can also search for a phrase by wrapping it in quotes. Try searching for "Raffles system".
Adriano Faria Posted July 23, 2019 Posted July 23, 2019 Is there any setting to change default behavior from OR to AND? 1 minute ago, Matt said: Try searching for "Raffles system". Still the 8th place. I mean, you have to think as a user. The vast majority won’t know that.
Management Matt Posted July 23, 2019 Management Posted July 23, 2019 3 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said: Is there any setting to change default behavior from OR to AND? Still the 8th place. I mean, you have to think as a user. The vast majority won’t know that. We do, which is why we have this:
Adriano Faria Posted July 23, 2019 Posted July 23, 2019 Sorry, not working. Not clear for the “regular” user.
Management Matt Posted July 23, 2019 Management Posted July 23, 2019 What would you suggest? We allow Admins to decide if it should be "And" / "or" by default. We have the option to switch between And/Or searching both in the main search form, and in the drop down search form on every page. We have "Can't find what you're looking for" links to search variants of your original terms. I can't think of what else we can do.
marklcfc Posted July 23, 2019 Posted July 23, 2019 15 minutes ago, Matt said: I can't think of what else we can do. Rewrite unread content page (you know why 😔_
Adriano Faria Posted July 23, 2019 Posted July 23, 2019 16 minutes ago, Matt said: What would you suggest? Everything is there, Matt... they just don't work together. 🤷♀️
AmericanRev2 Posted July 23, 2019 Author Posted July 23, 2019 @Matt Please read this: VS Donations? ......DONATIONS?..... Really? ... Nice... And no where on the first page is anything to do with Group Mention this is one example of a million times i have to use google to find something here, even my own posts The search here is too complicated the most relevant data should ALWAYS show for the search term
AmericanRev2 Posted July 23, 2019 Author Posted July 23, 2019 Remove some of the search options .... if i search for CAT show me some posts about cats, some threads about cats, some photos of cats. If google can do what it does and search every website and pull everything i want to know using NO SEARCH OPTIONS then why do we need all these options to search our own site exspecially when i search Cat it returns with information about Dogs
Management Matt Posted July 24, 2019 Management Posted July 24, 2019 You need to search for: "Group Mention" (note the quotes). This treats it as a phrase, and not "group" or "mention". This is a hint underneath the search results. We used to default to "AND" search which would have been better for you, but then we had people searching for "cars bikes" and only finding results for items that had both 'cars' and 'bikes' in the content, when they wanted content to match either. Also, we use ElasticSearch's relevancy which does a fairly good job. You can't really say "make your search results as good as Google's" as we don't have the processing power, their custom algorithms and so on. Using ElasticSearch with the and/or default set to your own preference generally returns a good data set. I think search is spot on here. Our two posts rank as more relevant as they are very new (something Google won't factor as it needs to spider and crunch the data first)
coert_g Posted July 24, 2019 Posted July 24, 2019 7 minutes ago, Matt said: You need to search for: "Group Mention" (note the quotes). This treats it as a phrase, and not "group" or "mention". This is a hint underneath the search results. We used to default to "AND" search which would have been better for you, but then we had people searching for "cars bikes" and only finding results for items that had both 'cars' and 'bikes' in the content, when they wanted content to match either. Also, we use ElasticSearch's relevancy which does a fairly good job. You can't really say "make your search results as good as Google's" as we don't have the processing power, their custom algorithms and so on. Using ElasticSearch with the and/or default set to your own preference generally returns a good data set. I think search is spot on here. Our two posts rank as more relevant as they are very new (something Google won't factor as it needs to spider and crunch the data first) We're using Elastic Search and this is what we were given by a user who came across this example... He was looking for a thread titled "Tandem accident - Gatineau Quebec" - ( https://www.dropzone.com/forums/topic/26633-tandem-accident---gatineau-quebec/ ) When one searches for term "tandem accident gatineau" (without quotation) into the search, the results for the thread above do not appear. He then took a phrase from within the body of the same post, and tried to search for it "No cause for the reserve problem was found although it is hypothesized by military riggers" - then again returned no results for that thread. Is this a problem with the search, or with the indexing of forum posts? Because it returns some results from other posts related broadly to the search term, but that post doesn't appear in results. There's a few examples of this happening on our site...
Management Matt Posted July 24, 2019 Management Posted July 24, 2019 @coert_g I'd submit a support ticket so we can look in more detail.
jair101 Posted July 24, 2019 Posted July 24, 2019 46 minutes ago, Matt said: We used to default to "AND" search which would have been better for you, but then we had people searching for "cars bikes" and only finding results for items that had both 'cars' and 'bikes' in the content, when they wanted content to match either. I would humbly suggest to reconsider this default for the search engine here. There is no one size fits all solution, obviously, but I think nowadays most people assume AND by default instead of OR. Google also does by AND by default and it is the search that the majority of population are using.
AtariAge Posted July 24, 2019 Posted July 24, 2019 2 hours ago, Matt said: We used to default to "AND" search which would have been better for you, but then we had people searching for "cars bikes" and only finding results for items that had both 'cars' and 'bikes' in the content, when they wanted content to match either. This is one of the annoying things about searching on this forum for me, is that you are not ANDing search terms together by default. Pretty much every single time I use more than one term, I have to then click the link to AND the terms together. Who are these people using a search engine to try and find two disparate terms at the same time, as opposed to doing two searches? If you go to google and search for "cars bikes", you're going to get results that contain both terms at the top. Please make that the default here! ..Al
AtariAge Posted July 24, 2019 Posted July 24, 2019 On 7/23/2019 at 4:43 AM, Matt said: Have you guys tried our Elastic Search integration? I can say that the results improved a fair bit after installing this, and the results are returned MUCH faster. Definitely can recommend. However, one thing I'm not keen on is the stemming. It's fine sometimes, but you can't seem to force the search engine to NOT use stemming by putting a search term in quotes. If I put quotes around a word, it'll still search for the stem as opposed to the literal word. For instance, on my forum if I search for "coding" (with quotes), here's what I see: Not a single result containing "coding" on the first page of results, just "code" and "codes". How can I fix this? ..Al
marklcfc Posted July 24, 2019 Posted July 24, 2019 Does elasticsearch still cause issues when posting?
bfarber Posted July 24, 2019 Posted July 24, 2019 1 hour ago, AtariAge said: I can say that the results improved a fair bit after installing this, and the results are returned MUCH faster. Definitely can recommend. However, one thing I'm not keen on is the stemming. It's fine sometimes, but you can't seem to force the search engine to NOT use stemming by putting a search term in quotes. If I put quotes around a word, it'll still search for the stem as opposed to the literal word. For instance, on my forum if I search for "coding" (with quotes), here's what I see: Not a single result containing "coding" on the first page of results, just "code" and "codes". How can I fix this? ..Al You can't, and in fact this is one of the benefits of using Elasticsearch for most users. 42 minutes ago, marklcfc said: Does elasticsearch still cause issues when posting? There are no outstanding issues using Elasticsearch when posting (to my knowledge).
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