search needs some work

[AtariAge]

6 minutes ago, bfarber said:

You can't, and in fact this is one of the benefits of using Elasticsearch for most users.

I've already had users complain about this, that they were looking for some threads with specific terms and could not find them because of the stemming.  Would be nice if it could be less aggressive.

48 minutes ago, marklcfc said:

Does elasticsearch still cause issues when posting?

Posts are pretty much instantaneous on my forum with Elasticsearch.  I have 4.5 million posts.  The Elasticsearch data is stored on an NVMe SSD on the local server, and searches are damn fast (must faster than on this forum), even when pulling up the maximum of 10,000 results.  Database is sitting on another server in the same data center with a private connection to the web server.  Elasticsearch definitely helps cut down on the traffic between the two servers, as well as reduce load on the database server (currently running MySQL, but going to switch to MariaDB soon). 

 ..Al

[ibaker]

I am going to weigh in here and also say that the search function of IPS is dreadful compared to others, dare I say XF and also trying to find posts in a thread by a specific user that contain a specific word...sorry but the IPS search is not good especially for the average general user who expects to simply type a few words in and click search and up pops exactly what they are looking for without having to know about syntax, quotes etc

[zyx]

Our users have a huge issue with search, and on big communities it really is challenging to find what you are looking for. I think it's true that if users input all the options in the advanced search correctly and use the recommendations, it's a lot better, but the google example in the first post sums it up perfectly. You just type in what you are looking for and it's one of the top results.

I realise competing with google search is impossible, but I still would love to see a huge focus on search improvements in future versions, as it's such an important feature yet I try to avoid using it due to never getting the right results. This sentiment is echoed by most of my users who have spoken about it.