Search???

[pledg]

Can anyone confirm if the search feature of the forum is working???

[pelrun]

It doesn't work and it's basically never worked. Use google if you want to find something specific.

[eto]

It doesn't work and it's basically never worked. Use google if you want to find something specific.

Before the upgrade it worked. If I remember right, the index was recalculated and after that, it indeed returned useful results. 

[Gryzor]

Never made it work in a satisfactory way dammit... No amount of indexing or search method tweaking ever proved enough

Let me try an Index refresh.

[Gryzor]

...Yeah, it's way too slow. Three hours later and it's still at 10%, so it'll take a couple more days...

[eto]

...Yeah, it's way too slow. Three hours later and it's still at 10%, so it'll take a couple more days...

Thanks for trying! 

[Gryzor]

Hold on to your pants, everyone, 22%!

[pledg]

Thanks for looking into it!

I'm sure I remember using it for searching posts related to components etc?

[dragon]

It looks complety broke for me, always returns nothing found .

[Gryzor]

Still building the index. Will be done in a couple of days.. the problem is, I have to have the admin page open for it to build it, and so it only runs for a few hours per day. When it does, it processes for about 0.2% and then it pauses for ten seconds to avoid overloading the server. So there you have it... 

[Gryzor]

Search index complete. Do let me know.

[MaV]

It works. However ...

From the search bar in the upper left corner:
1) The time between two searches is 5 seconds which is a bit irritating when I mistype and correct a search phrase. I suppose you can't lower the time, because of idiots and bots that'll take advantage of that. :/

2) The search results show only the first 100 entries starting from the oldest one I presume, so 2009 onwards. That's not good. I can't speak for others but I'd like to search within the whole range starting from the most recent and going backwards.

I do have more options on the search page, but the option to search beginning with the most recent entries returns posts from 2010 first, which can't be right.

[eto]

2) The search results show only the first 100 entries starting from the oldest one I presume, so 2009 onwards. That's not good. I can't speak for others but I'd like to search within the whole range starting from the most recent and going backwards.

The preselection is "most relevant". Just select "most recent topics first" in the drop-down.

BUT: this is also not doing it properly. A search for "bad command", where we had several topics lately just returns hits before 2021. If I also limit the timeframe to 0-365 days, I do find all recent topics. So something is deeply wrong in the search. Might actually be, that it stops searching after e.g. 100 matches and then only those are sorted.

Is that a known issue of the SMF search?

[Gryzor]

So here's what's happening behind the scenes:

-limit was a search every 5 seconds, lowered that to 2 seconds.
-limit of results to show is 100, will up this to... how many?
-although, as @eto said, you can sort by relevance/date, here are the weights I'm using:

Relative search weight for number of matching messages within a topic: 30%
Relative search weight for age of last matching message: : 25%
Relative search weight for topic length: 20%
Relative search weight for a matching subject: 15%
Relative search weight for a first message match:  10%
Relative search weight for a sticky topic: 0%

These are all the criteria that can be set, and the weights I've assigned. Let me know if you think they should be different!

[eto]

Hard to say. It depends a bit what kind of searches are most beneficial to most users. The current weights probably favour searches for intense debates and long, more complex threads, however tend to suppress those everyday issues, where someone immediately has an answer.

[MaV]

The preselection is "most relevant". Just select "most recent topics first" in the drop-down.

I know, but changing this changed nothing substantial. It still was only posts from 2009 and 2010.

[Gryzor]

Ok, then I should push matching subject/first message match and lower topic length. Will also lower age.

@MaV , it would help if you shared your query

[MaV]

To get a large variety of results I searched for the more generic "graphics" and "RAM". Changing to "more recent posts" changed nothing substantial, the results never went beyond 2010.

[MaV]

"Starglider" also just showed results up to 2010.

If I search for my posts (By user "MaV") with "Starglider" in it, I get results from 2016 as "most recent".

A search for "Sanxion" - a very unusual topic - returned results up to 2015. The resulting threads themselves which I checked, did not contain Sanxion. Mostly only "sa" or "san" was found by the browser in these threads (multiple pages). And that even though I included the quotation marks which should result in exact matches only, right?

[Gryzor]

For me, RAM went back to 2007. Starglider, back to 2006 but the result did not, indeed, contain the keyword. Something must be broken indeed... 

I changed the word matching setting to look for whole words only (you'd expect that to be user-definable but it's dumber than that).

[Gryzor]

I tweaked the criteria weights, and also changed the indexing method. Now results do seem appropriate but again go back to 2010 in our examples, for some reason...

[Gryzor]

So what probably happens is that the search engine looks at the results and some of the oldest ones don't make the cut... You can specify a date range, say 10 years ago to the beginning of time to see older results. For me it worked!