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Is Resetera's search the worst ever or what?

Jotakori

Jotakori

Teyvat Traveler
Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,184
Weltall Zero said:
Ah, I see. Didn't see you had filtered by author.

To sum it up and split some hairs:
1) The "quick search" (results that appear when simply typing in the bar) uses a completely different algorithm that doesn't respect your preference setting (even though the setting says it does), and is entirely useless.
2) The search itself (clicking "search") works, but when set to order by recent (or default, which is the same) and searching for topics, it will sort them by date of creation rather than last post.
3) NOT searching by thread title will return all posts that contain the words. This means it will not return posts in a topic that has the words in the title, unless the post itself also contains them.
4) This means there's no way to search for "latest updated thread with these words in its title", which would be the bread and butter of what most users search (and Google's algorithm is probably closer to this).


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LMAO SHIT
 
Sybil

Sybil

Avenger
Oct 27, 2017
1,642
It's so weird, like I'll try to find the most recent OT for something and then I can only find posts from some ancient OT

so yeah, I just use Google with my searches and then it finds it no problem
 
GrrImAFridge

GrrImAFridge

ONE THOUSAND DOLLARYDOOS
Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,677
Western Australia
Weltall Zero said:
Ah, I see. Didn't see you had filtered by author.

To sum it up and split some hairs:
1) The "quick search" (results that appear when simply typing in the bar) uses a completely different algorithm that doesn't respect your preference setting (even though the setting says it does), and is entirely useless.
2) The search itself (clicking "search") works, but when set to order by recent (or default, which is the same) and searching for topics, it will sort them by date of creation rather than last post.
3) NOT searching by thread title will return all posts that contain the words. This means it will not return posts in a topic that has the words in the title, unless the post itself also contains them.
4) This means there's no way to search for "latest updated thread with these words in its title", which would be the bread and butter of what most users search (and Google's algorithm is probably closer to this).
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Ah, I see. I've never considered the option of having thread results sorted by activity, but, yeah, now that you mention it, it's definitely a strange oversight on XF's part and should be added if possible. Also, I could not agree more with you vis-a-vis quick search and wish it could be disabled altogether (few things annoy me more than when I go to hit "Search" and click on a result instead).
 
Weltall Zero

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
19,343
Madrid
JaseC said:
Ah, I see. I've never considered the option of having thread results sorted by activity, but, yeah, now that you mention it, it's definitely a strange oversight on XF's part and should be added if possible. Also, I could not agree more with you vis-a-vis quick search and wish it could be disabled altogether.
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By the way, I tried changing results to "relevant" rather than default / recent, and it actually seems to work better. I'm tentatively leaving it like that.
 
Weltall Zero

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
19,343
Madrid
Sybil said:
It's so weird, like I'll try to find the most recent OT for something and then I can only find posts from some ancient OT

so yeah, I just use Google with my searches and then it finds it no problem
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Same here; that's because searching for "OT" will only bring up exactly that, while the most recent OT will be like OT5 or whatever... which of course the forum's search considers a completely different and unrelated word. :P
 
Cyanity

Cyanity

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,345
You're not alone, OP. Era's search sucks for trying to hash out what I'm looking for if I don't know a few keywords from the title.
 

DownUnderCoder

Administrator
Dec 15, 2018
638
Weltall Zero said:
Hey, thank you, this will help a lot! I'm assuming there's no way to make that the default for all users?
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The problem is it is sorted by creation date, not last update. XenForo for some wonky reason doesn't support 'last update' as a search criteria.

Weltall Zero said:
Never mind anyway, it's not that useful, because 1) it doesn't apply to the quick search results (even though the option says that it does), and b) it sorts by creation date of the thread, rather than last post. :/
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The quick search aka search-as-you-type aka auto-complete uses a 'relevancy' like search rather than simple date sorting as otherwise the results are hilariously worse. This is because the algorithm it uses is designed to handle partial word fragments at the expense of accuracy. 'relevancy' means it can prune a pile of really really bad matches generated by aggressive word-fragment matching.

nullref said:
I wonder if Era licenses XenForo Enhanced Search, or just uses the default MySQL-based fulltext search. Either way, it's probably ultimately just Lucene or similar under the hood, with some basic field weighting for relevance. That's never going to be Google, though it could probably be improved somewhat.
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Trying to use MySQL full-text search would crush the site given ResetEra's size. Era does use XF's Elastic Search/Lucene support with some tweaks which do help make it better, but sadly not by a huge amount. Search is hard.

Weltall Zero said:
Same here; that's because searching for "OT" will only bring up exactly that, while the most recent OT will be like OT5 or whatever... which of course the forum's search considers a completely different and unrelated word. :P
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It would be hard to make an even less useful text fragment for search than "OT".

Part of the issue is you can have word stemming or exact text matching. Not both.
 
V23

V23

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,950
Nope. The worst are the search boxes on websites that don't clear any text in them the first time you click on them. Having to delete "Type your search query here" is so obnoxious.
 
Cow Mengde

Cow Mengde

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,725
Pretty sure the old site is much worse. I say this because I literally used the search function here an hour ago and immediately found what I wanted. I don't even remember successfully searching anything in the old forum.
 
Zips

Zips

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,913
It's been serviceable in the times I've used it. But I can't say I've had a need to use it an awful lot though.
 
Einchy

Einchy

Member
Oct 25, 2017
42,659
Era's is okay but the worst is Reddit's, I've literally never found what I was looking for using it. Easier to just google it.
 
Doc Holliday

Doc Holliday

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,816
Better than the old place before the exodus.
Search > no results > Wait 30 seconds before searching again argh!!!
 
flyinj

flyinj

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,967
On that note, I really wish the search defaulted to "Search titles only"

That is literally all I ever use it for. And I assume the majority of everyone else on the site
 
Duxxy3

Duxxy3

Member
Oct 27, 2017
21,763
USA
I typically use google to find threads on this forum. It's not that the search doesn't find anything, it doesn't find what I want.
 
Siggy-P

Siggy-P

Avenger
Mar 18, 2018
11,865
The search bar is only good for when some poster you recognise is banned and you're trying to find out which post got them banned because your a nosey git like me.

I would rate it higher than Reddit if not for that it also just generally freaks out on mobile if I'm actually in a thread. So of I wanted to search up spiderman threads for example, I'd have to go on the etcetera forum first rather than jsut type it right now.
 
SirFritz

SirFritz

Member
Jan 22, 2018
2,082
No that's reddit. For that I've turned to just using google and putting the name of the subreddit in the search box.
 
Darknight

Darknight

"I'd buy that for a dollar!"
Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,847
On a different topic of search, does anyone else find this aspect super annoying? When you start typing something into the search, it starts showing possible thread results, but if you want to change the location from Everywhere to something like This Forum or This Thread, as soon as you click on the drop down, it changes the location of the drop down menu because it removes all the thread results? It really irritates me that what I'm currently trying to do action on with my mouse has moved after clicking on it to pull down the drop down menu. I would love this to be better designed.
 
MrKlaw

MrKlaw

Member
Oct 25, 2017
33,073
yeah its terrible. I just type 'site:restera.com searchterm' in the address bar and it'll usually pop the most active threads and the ones I want will be on page 1. Seeing the summary of how bad it is at the top of this page is sad but not entirely suprising
 
Floex

Floex

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,763
Google, every time.

I would to hear more from the people who say that search here works fine because I don't believe you lol.
 
darz1

darz1

Member
Dec 18, 2017
7,095
Yeah I definitely Google search rather than use the search function on Era

Jakisthe said:
Pinterest.

The absolute worst search functionality which could possibly be conceived, much less actually executed on.
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Pinterest is so badly designed overall. It's like they purposely made it obtuse. if I Google something and it comes up with Pinterest I don't even waste my time trying to open it.
 
Ravelle

Ravelle

Member
Oct 31, 2017
17,806
It helpt to put OT in your search for the game you search, otherwise the search is very vague.
 
julia crawford

julia crawford

Took the red AND the blue pills
Member
Oct 27, 2017
35,301
I mean.... Google is s dedicated search place that has as many servers around the world as children playing call of duty
 
Combichristoffersen

Combichristoffersen

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
12,756
As long as Bing exists, the Era search can never be the worst :p Bing is basically useless over here. Absolute trash search engine.
 
KillLaCam

KillLaCam

Prophet of Truth
Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,388
Seoul
It's usually fine for me. But there has definitely been times where I couldn't find the thing I was looking for.
 
SigSig

SigSig

Member
Oct 26, 2017
4,777
advanced search is fine. this is one of the few sites which I don't search via site:resetera.com intitle:"lttp shrek 2" type queries on a generic search engine.
 
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