TomB Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 OK, Ill just ask the questions again. Ive beared with the forum, continued to post and tried not to be too negative, but its wearing thin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vine Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 "Go to Google and search for widetrack site:lotus7.club or widetrack site:lotus7.club techtalkHow's that?"Well, that's a neat trick, but surely we shouldn't have to rely on a third-party search engine?Like many others, I'm getting severely hacked off with the utterly useless search tool. That, plus the loss of access to huge amounts of historical technical knowledge and advice (because the links didn't transcribe to the new BC), is causing me immense frustration. My use of the L7C site is (and always has been) almost entirely restricted to BC TechTalk. With busted links and a totally inadequate search tool, the value of the site to me diminishes by the day. I fear that the value will have dropped so far by the time I'm due to renew membership in the New Year that I may decide to cut my losses altogether.Back on 5 November, Shaun said "Like the email says, we know there are some issues with search. Right now number 1 priority is site performance. When that is adequate we'll look at improving search.Search is one of the powerful aspects of the new site as it crosses all content types and during site development was working really well. The massive data migration would appear to have caused some issues which we'll look at as soon as we can"Can someone please tell me what the current position is?JV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomB Posted December 17, 2014 Share Posted December 17, 2014 JK, it works, although doesn't hi very far back in time, but it's better than the search on BC as it can be tailored to a particular sub forum. Can a 'Powered by Google' search box be incorporated into the forum software like on the Pistonheads forum? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Jonathan Kay Posted January 5, 2015 Member Share Posted January 5, 2015 Looks like a good time to play with searching again...Jonathan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjmmarsh Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 Noooo Jonathan...... You must resist! Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roger Ford Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 How does the new engine deal with multiple words? I tried "fuel price escalator" and it came up with lots of posts about fuel and prices, but none appeared to have the word "escalator" in them. Can we use AND to combine words? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ray Pearce Posted January 5, 2015 Share Posted January 5, 2015 I tested the "new improved" search using the word Sardinia, which I remembered appearing in the Swiss Watch thread.It didn't find it.I manually found the thread to confirm that sardinia appearedThen I tried a search for Swiss WatchIt still didn't find it.Fail Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Support Team Shaun_E Posted January 5, 2015 Support Team Share Posted January 5, 2015 The search works well but the indexing of the database is way behind - I've asked the developers to speed that up so the indexing catches up to the present. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Area Representative Golf Juliet Tango Posted January 6, 2015 Area Representative Share Posted January 6, 2015 OK. Thanks Shaun. Essentially, we need to wait for the indexing to catch up before really putting search through it's paces. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Support Team Shaun_E Posted January 6, 2015 Support Team Share Posted January 6, 2015 Index now completed - try the Sardinia search again and it appears. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roger Ford Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 The parameterised search is good - all the "filter by" options on the left.But it's unclear what the free text search box does.It looks like stemming is on by default - if I search for "indicating" I get loads of hits on "indicator" or "indicators". That's useful for increasing recall - I'll find more items - but bad for precision: if I specifically want to find "indicating" I'm not likely to be able to do so. Interestingly, "infinity" found "infinate" as well as "infinite" so it looks like it's some kind of rule-based stemming rather than dictionary based.I can't figure out what happens with two-word searches. Certainly if I search for BT Infinity it seems to come out with stuff containing both terms, but if I search for "cable router" I find items with the individual terms in - like ones about speedo cables. There doesn't seem to be any way to force an AND or a phrase search.After you've done a search, your search terms disappear from the "enter terms" box and are replaced by "What did you want to do?". It would be much more useful if your search was displayed there - firstly because you might have forgotten exactly what you entered, and secondly because you can then edit it to refine your search.Similarly once you've chosen a "sort by" option, there's no indication of your choice. So it's not clear whether your results are ordered by relevancy, date or title (I'm not sure that title is a particularly useful option, by the way). There should be some indication of which is active.It's certainly greatly improved, but the old Blatchat search was much more precise (due to the lack of stemming and the forced AND search between terms) and I'd wager that experienced searchers could find things much more quickly there. If there was an option to turn stemming off (which may not be possible if it's done at indexing time) and to force AND or phrase searches, then we'd have a great tool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Support Team Shaun_E Posted January 6, 2015 Support Team Share Posted January 6, 2015 Well we're getting there and it's certainly now a very usable search even if the precision for experienced searchers isn't there.You can see what you searched for in the breadcrumbs above the search box - I get your point about editing it. When I click on sort by date I see a little down arrow beside it (search descending) and if I sort by title I see an up arrow.I tried your search for "cable router" (using the quotation marks) and it only returned 6 results all with the phrase "cable router" in them - not ideal as it didn't return threads with cable and router in them separately but maybe useful.As I find out more about the search tool I'll see if we can add to it. It may be possible to allow a forced AND. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian B Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 Shaun, FWIW if I enter a search for [ "cable router" ] in quotes then I'd only expect to get results with that exact phrase, not cable and router separately. The addition of the ability to search for the above or [ cable AND router ] would be a good addition though (as would a thumbsup emoticon without the toothy smilie ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vine Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 Thanks for your efforts, Shaun. It's certainly an improvement.Two questions:1. How far back does/will the indexing go? I just ran a test "title" search on my old reg. no. in Spotted, but nothing came back. I know it was in the old BC (probably 5-6 years ago).2. It seems I can't restrict a search to my own threads. For example, I might want to remind myself what I said a couple of years ago on a subject (or even what I put in the title), but when I do a search, my name isn't listed under "Filter by author". Is that because I'm the logged-in user? Is that how it's supposed to work? And I totally agree with Roger F's comments -- a bit of Boolean support would work wonders! JV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Support Team Shaun_E Posted January 6, 2015 Support Team Share Posted January 6, 2015 Hi John - indexing goes back to the beginning! Is this the thread you searched for? There is a space in the reg number!http://www.lotus7.club/forum/spotted/t589-pbpYour name is only listed if you are the author of one of the results of the search. Try searching for "Vine" and you will then be able to filter by your username.You can see all your own posts by going to your profile and clicking the "Forum posts" tab - in ascending date order so not incredibly useful if you are a prolific poster! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ray Pearce Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 Much, much improved but...(there's always a but isn't there )Multi word searches seem to default to OR e.g. Do the club watch search and then try sorting by date - gives you loads of posts which only include the word club. Putting the search term in quotes seems to search for the exact phrase but doesn't help if the words aren't adjacent.Would AND be a better default? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vine Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 Is this the thread you searched for? There is a space in the reg number!It is, and you're right! Thanks for sorting that one out. Your name is only listed if you are the author of one of the results of the searchTo test this, I searched on "R400 Duratec: bizarre speedo behaviour", a thread I started, with precisely that title, in Sep 2009. It came top of the results list but my name didn't appear in the "Filter by author" list, even after I clicked "Show more". There were plenty of authors listed -- but not me! So, I'm still puzzled by that one.As suggested, I then searched on "Vine". The author list showed me at the top (with 138 in brackets). The 138 matched the number of posts shown on my profile. Then, when I clicked on one of the other authors, I got a list of posts of theirs to which I'd contributed. That's brilliant! Clearly, that bit of the search tool works really well.JV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Support Team Shaun_E Posted January 6, 2015 Support Team Share Posted January 6, 2015 To test this, I searched on "R400 Duratec: bizarre speedo behaviour", a thread I started, with precisely that title, in Sep 2009. It came top of the results list but my name didn't appear in the "Filter by author" list, even after I clicked "Show more". There were plenty of authors listed -- but not me! So, I'm still puzzled by that one.That is odd. It looks like there is a maximum number of authors that can be listed. If you search for "speedo behaviour" (using the quotation marks to only find that phrase) then you get a short list including your thread and you are now in the filter by author list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Vine Posted January 6, 2015 Share Posted January 6, 2015 Yes, interesting. That works exactly the way I'd expect. One for the developers to elucidate?JV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BBL Posted January 6, 2015 Author Share Posted January 6, 2015 Search box now DOES work as advertised! Good work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mechanical Moz Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 I don't suppose it would be possible to exclude signatures from the search results in future? It's a little frustrating when a search returns every single post by a member just because their sig happens to feature one of your search terms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Support Team Shaun_E Posted January 14, 2015 Support Team Share Posted January 14, 2015 Signatures from the old site are just part of the post body text so can't be excluded - sorry.Ref Boolean searches - it looks like "AND" does work but must be in capitals. This was pointed out to me by ones of our members (thanks Steve) and a couple of quick tests seems to prove the point. Please have a go with this and feedback here if it looks OK or not.Try :searching For CSR gets 5000 hitssearching for oil gets 15000 hitscsr oil gets 19000csr AND oil gets 500orDuratec oil gets > 31600 Duratec AND oil gets > 2400The search would appear to cover the entire thread rather than just a single topic/comment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Support Team Shaun_E Posted January 14, 2015 Support Team Share Posted January 14, 2015 I've done a bit more checking and using "AND" still returns some results without both terms but it certainly reduces the number of results and most include both terms. We'll keep working on this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian B Posted January 19, 2015 Share Posted January 19, 2015 This is still not working acceptably Shaun I've spent the last hour searching for a thread titled "DeDion Failure - request for info" started by me in Techtalk, around 2005.I've tried :"Dedion Failure"Dedion AND requestand filtered by techtalk and author Ian BIt also doesn't appear in the posts in my profile (and it was made with the username Ian B).Any ideas what's happenning yet?Also, can we PLEASE have the Author list in alphabetical order?!Thanks, ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member Jonathan Kay Posted January 19, 2015 Member Share Posted January 19, 2015 Is it this thread or the closed one to which you refer in that one?Jonathan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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