Forum search function not working reliably?

I have some concern that the search function for this forum may no longer work in a reliable, useful manner. I am wondering what has happened and whether something can be done to fix it.

Here is what raised my concern: I could remember significant parts of a post that was made some time back, and I wanted to review the follow-up posts. I could not remember in which thread the post appeared. I felt I could remember one sentence of the post perhaps in its entirety, so I used the forum search function. First, I tried searching on a few words that I was certain were correct. Later, I searched on the entire sentence. The search results were a couple of ads and some unrelated posts from the forum.

Eventually I found the post through extensive wandering and a bit of luck. Once I had found it, I ran more searches. I searched for the exact, complete sentence that I had been thinking of (copy and paste into the search box), but the search function did not find the post. I then copied and pasted an entire paragraph from the post into the search function, with the response being (again) a couple of ads followed by "No results." It seems that no matter how much or how little I used in the search box, the search function could not find that post. What's up with that?

I had posted a photo in that same thread, so I searched for the name of the photo and later for the entire URL that I had used to link that photo into the thread. "No results", other than the ads. That can't be proper performance of a search function for this forum, can it?

I agree it is no longer very effective.

I am forwarding this thread for a look. Thanks.

Hi all,

we're using google's custom search engine for now, which will be soon replaced with Elastic search, but I don't see current one is working bad. I tried some expample sentences from posts and it seem to find those posts. Please when reporting bugs like these send me examples, so I can take a look at them. If you have send me examples of what you typed, so I could see why you didn't get desired resuts.

Thanks,
Miroslav

Quote: miroslavlav

Please when reporting bugs like these send me examples, so I can take a look at them. If you have send me examples of what you typed, so I could see why you didn't get desired resuts.

OK, so now I get to show what a silly topic I was searching for....

Several years ago, I had posted a picture of when my wife and I had visited Pike's Peak. Nareed responded, asking, "How did you find the air up there?" I sent one of my smart-Alec replies saying, "Well, we kept gasping for it, but I'm not sure we ever found any. ;-)"

That post was followed by further discussion (several participants) of breathing difficulties at high altitude, and that was what I was looking to review.

My reply to Nareed's question was in this post. Initially, I tried searching for part of, then all of, the sentence quoted above. Later, I searched for the entire paragraph below that. My earlier post with the photo is located here. That post included an image stored at http://www.4-sqr.com/images/Vegas/WoVCon_III/Pikes_Peak.jpg and a search last night for that url did not reveal the post.

Is that enough specific examples of where I encountered my search difficulties? If not, perhaps I could describe the problem in more detail.


Edit: I just searched again for that URL, and the search function responded with four ads and "No Results", even though the search text appears both in the post from 2013 and in this very post.

My guess is Google never indexed that thread

If that is the explanation, then I think that Google may not be a very effective means of performing searches through the 624,051 posts currently in 30,034 very-diverse threads in this forum.

Thanks for your reply Doc. Yes, I see it's not that effective and since we haven't got control of the engine, we're replacing it.

I suppose that we'll have Elastic search solution ready by the end of the week or during next week. I'll let you know once it's live :)

Just to let you know, since we spoke about it in this thread, search function is now enhanced and I think you'll find it working a lot better than before :)

Whenever I see miroslav name and his picture it makes me think of the micros poker cartoon. I miss those, wish they would have continued.

Whenever I search for something you can do it directly through Google as well. Something like.
Micros site: wizardofvegas.com

Quote: miroslavlav

Just to let you know, since we spoke about it in this thread, search function is now enhanced and I think you'll find it working a lot better than before :)

I do find it a huge improvement, miro. Thanks so much.

Is it really better?

For shits & giggles, I searched for ‘three card poker’ (without quotes), the third hit was for the article I wrote; https://wizardofvegas.com/articles/introduction-to-poker-in-a-casino-poker-room/

Why would it hit on that? My article is about regular poker.

So I figured maybe those words, not connected, are each somewhere. Except they’re not. “Three” is nowhere on the page.

When I searched again but with quotes, I got no hits.

When I did a regular Google search:
site:wizardofvegas.com "three card poker"
I got good results. Ditto for without the quotes.

I guess I’ll continue to do Google searches...

Quote: DJTeddyBear

Is it really better?

For shits & giggles, I searched for ‘three card poker’ (without quotes), the third hit was for the article I wrote; https://wizardofvegas.com/articles/introduction-to-poker-in-a-casino-poker-room/

Why would it hit on that? My article is about regular poker.

So I figured maybe those words, not connected, are each somewhere. Except they’re not. “Three” is nowhere on the page.

When I searched again but with quotes, I got no hits.

When I did a regular Google search:
site:wizardofvegas.com "three card poker"
I got good results. Ditto for without the quotes.

I guess I’ll continue to do Google searches...

For a publicly-indexable website (i.e. not one that requires a login to read), I don't know why anyone spends any time or money building their own search. No offense to the WoV developers, of course. But google will almost always do it better, for free.

Quote: AcesAndEights

For a publicly-indexable website (i.e. not one that requires a login to read), I don't know why anyone spends any time or money building their own search. No offense to the WoV developers, of course. But google will almost always do it better, for free.

I think the idea is that it's site-specific, which you can do via google, but that function is built-in here. With google, you have to type out the name of the site.

However, the new search does not cover the member database, or search a poster's name by that person's post. This is a definite downgrade IMO. For example, in the old database, if I entered "beachbumbabs", the first entry after the paid ads was my profile page.

I asked miro a couple days ago for that database to be included in the search parameters, to restore that ability. I think they're working on it, but haven't gotten to it yet.

Quote: beachbumbabs

I think the idea is that it's site-specific, which you can do via google, but that function is built-in here. With google, you have to type out the name of the site.

You can code up a search box on your website that ties in to Google's search and automatically puts the "site:foobarbaz.com" into the search bar. Lots of sites do it.

That being said, there is no way to refine the search to different parts of the site (e.g. member profiles vs. posts). I know you are actually asking for the reverse of that, but it is one reason to build your own in-house search.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

Is it really better?

For shits & giggles, I searched for ‘three card poker’ (without quotes), the third hit was for the article I wrote; https://wizardofvegas.com/articles/introduction-to-poker-in-a-casino-poker-room/

Why would it hit on that? My article is about regular poker.

So I figured maybe those words, not connected, are each somewhere. Except they’re not. “Three” is nowhere on the page.

When I searched again but with quotes, I got no hits.

When I did a regular Google search:
site:wizardofvegas.com "three card poker"
I got good results. Ditto for without the quotes.

I guess I’ll continue to do Google searches...

Guides weren't included in search previously, but now they are, so please check again

Quote: AcesAndEights

For a publicly-indexable website (i.e. not one that requires a login to read), I don't know why anyone spends any time or money building their own search. No offense to the WoV developers, of course. But google will almost always do it better, for free.

Google isn't offering payed, no-ads, search engine solutions anymore Transition from Google Site Search to Custom Search Engine, so since we don't want to use google custom search that's containing ads, and since google search is limited to pages it has in it's index, and also you can look at Doc's posts in this thread and see what he was complaining about (while we had google search), we decided to go with our own solution
beachbumbabs, we added member pages to search, so please check that also

Thanks :)

Quote: miroslavlav

Google isn't offering payed, no-ads, search engine solutions anymore Transition from Google Site Search to Custom Search Engine, so since we don't want to use google custom search that's containing ads, and since google search is limited to pages it has in it's index, and also you can look at Doc's posts in this thread and see what he was complaining about (while we had google search), we decided to go with our own solution

Sounds good. I didn't realize you had been using Google previously.