Is it just me or is the search function on this site terrible?

But, as you just said, people don't use tags on forums - which makes them utterly useless on a practical level. On top of this there is a more fundamental problem, which is that the thread starter can never know with perfect precision exactly what the final scope of any given thread will be, so even if they did set tags on the thread they might well not cover the scope of the answer you are searching for.

I've also got to say that I would take something that "looks shit" over something that doesn't work any day of the week.

 

They can give indication of the general topic mentioned. The vast majority of the time, the topic is exactly that and doesn't change, as we don't really have vague threads. We're not a stickler for on-topicness, but most people stick to it quite well anyway.

The search, whilst not perfect, works so long as you aren't expecting too much of it. Stick to a single word that's more than four characters and it'll work just fine. You can limit to a particular forum, a particular poster, since a certain date, titles only, use a particular prefix (e.g. search only UK sales)... it's good enough for now. And... you can search tags

I notice people don't give specific examples, so it's impossible to say "ah yeah, the search sucks" or "well, stop using such crap search terms!"

Anyone else who is too lazy to type site:assemblergames.com in Google, look at @TriMesh 's profile for a totally crappy search function

 

Again, I think you are missing the point. Yes, I'm sure the search is "working as designed" - but it's using a design paradigm that comes from the previous century, and people have become used to using search engines that can perform semantic searches on the whole web - a dataset that's many, many orders of magnitude larger than the posts on Assembler. There was a time when select * from posts where postcontent like %searchterm% was good enough, but it really isn't any more. If you want a good example of the way the search sucks, try "Nintendo DS" (with or without quotes) - the search function throws away the "DS" bit and just does a search for "Nintendo" - with a predictably large number of spurious hits.

If you don't want to fix it, then you don't want to fix it - but I have to say I find your attempt to suggest that it's not problematic rather startling.

 

As I said, you have to have a search term of four or more characters - the same as just about ANY search function that doesn't use Elasticsearch. Your surprise that "DS" cannot be searched for is curious. Incidentally, it's because two and three letter words are common - some idiot searches for and... and that's a nice server load there.

I also said that installing Elasticsearch means installing Java, which we all know is not very secure. Likewise, I said that the install can go badly. I tried it on my test server, and it DID go badly. Server runs fine, install Elasticsearch... BAM! No website. If it doesn't work on the test server, I'm not going to recommend we try on the live server. Plus, as I already said, it will increase the server load.

YET AGAIN as I already said... if people tagged posts with DS, you'd have no problem finding DS posts. I find it rather startling that you don't agree that tagging posts would be useful It would also reduce server load when searching for a term such as DS, because that will pick up all sorts of bollocks... like gonaDS

 

I think you are confusing exasperation with surprise. Yes, I'm well aware that a combination of a naive search algorithm with short search terms will result in excessive system loading, but in my opinion the solution to this is "avoid naive search algorithms" rather than "prohibit short search terms". It's not like any of this stuff is exactly new - Lucene (which is, incidentally, the indexer that underlies ElasticSearch) has been available as open source software since 1999 - if you don't like Java, then there is even a PHP version of it baked into the Zend framework. I'm not suggesting that it's trivial, because it's isn't - but it's very much a solved problem. Also note that using a real indexer will also largely eliminate the "gonaDS" issue you mentioned.

I have to admit I'm not exactly familiar with XenForo, but I take if from what your saying that ElasticSearch is he only full-text search plugin available that doesn't restrict the length of the search terms? If that's the case, and installing it hoses the system, then I guess it leaves the existing search as the only plausible option.

As far tags go, well, I think we are in agreement that the large majority of people don't use them - which IMO renders any discussion of how useful they might be if were occupying an alternate universe where people did somewhat moot.

 

Theoretically, there'd also be a pragmatical "prohibit most short search terms" approach. But that'd involve patching a whitelist of known relevant words into the forum search so I guess it's probably right out. (Not to mention the need to come up with sensible content for that whitelist.)

About the new Nintendo GonaDS: At least the current search algo seems to look at whole words (try eg "hardware" vs "ardware"), but yeah that's definitely a thing to watch out for when picking a search method.

 

Can you add a link to it below maybe?

 

The only available option is the internal premium add-on for Xenforo (naturally others don't want to piss the devs off by cloning it) that uses ElasticSearch. So yes, until we can safely get a test server running Java and ElasticSearch, we're stuck.

IF people read the big green bar at the top of the forum, explaining what wonderful new features are in Xenforo, they'd know about tags. Unfortunately, they don't. We can't force them to - it's one of those things. I could post a nice big sticky saying please tag your three letter words such as Wii, PSP, NES, N64 and indeed pertinent phrases with less characters such as "Nintendo 64" or "PlayStation 3". We know people won't do it. This is sad because, good search or no, tags are immensely handy.

Should you want to know what the advanced search would look like, go to the Xenforo forum and search Playstation 4. Pretty nice, right? Or Wii. That also works... well, it gives you a bunch of threads about Wii U. What if you wanted the original Wii? Well, the answer to that is simple....

Use tags!

There's never going to be a PERFECT search engine that knows exactly what you wanted, although ElasticSearch is a step in the right direction. It's a step we'd like to take... eventually. It would still help if users would use tags, though!

No. The ElasticSearch will be implemented eventually.... and won't mean editing every theme we have, then finding it's messed up when the theme has an update despite using a child (yes, that happened). And Google's page is FUGLY.

 

Who cares if it's ugly, if people want a google search option then a link is close enough.

 

The problem with editing the template, even a child, is that it can break when the template is updated - especially where things change for a new release of Xenforo, which happened not that long ago. And we have three templates currently - they'd all need editing, and it'll be different for each one.

 

While I understand that - is there anything work around? Like auto tagging system based of titles etc?

 

Ah, not being familiar with the pricing model of XenForo, I wasn't aware that the ElasticSearch plugin was a first-party product. I guess that also provides a perfect explanation of why the default search is so bogus, since the developers have an active disincentive to make any improvements to it.

 

Auto tagging would be both awesome and a bloody nightmare, no doubt! If it could somehow look at the list of current tags (which would need other posts to have tags added, I guess), then take those keywords and make them tags, that'd be nice. Of course, it would need to be able to distinguish between Wii and Wii U, then know that Mega Drive is the same as MegaDrive, and SNES is the same as Super Nintendo, Super NES and Super Famicom, whilst ignoring just NES or Famicom (both of which would be a separate tag) or Super on its own. Hmm.

Clever, eh? Better still, this is all the info you get before buying:

So there's no character limit and an advanced search will allow relevancy ordering, essentially.

 

Perhaps some kind of umbrella terms? The plugin will merge terms like "Wii U" as "WiiU" or "Mega Drive" as "Mega Drive".
Of course I have no clue how to make this even work, but just throwing it there.

 

I think that would work pretty well if you have a specific set of terms you are looking for - trying to do it in a fully general and automatic manner is well known as being a very hard problem, though. Actually a harder problem than search, since at least in search you know what you're looking for.

 

Therein lies another problem - yet again user-generated. Whilst most don't bother to tag at all, do those who do tag do so efficiently? For the most part, the answer is pretty positive.

I think there's such a thing as over-tagging, and being overly vague.... although I'm looking at tags and might write a guide at some point to explain efficient use (hopefully).

 

I've had to read many, many papers on tagging. And while it was once considered one of the great new technologies, things aren't nearly as clear now.