Question Search Bug(s)...

Search Bugs here!

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Can't see the second page of results of searching for Tracer: whateleyacademy.net/index.php/component/...hphrase=all&start=20

Man it sucks.

Tried searching for the Ribbon story, using a search term of ribbon. It was on page 3.

Really need to be able to search by story title and author and such, not just alphabetically order them.

I know it's probably on the list of things to do, but my first experience searching was awful.

One thing I've used as a work-around is to jump to the wiki and look the story up there... then just use the link to open up right to it on the site.

Yes, the search sucks, and is slow to boot. But I doubt that the search function is something that Kristin has much control over.


The problem, I think, is that the search algorithm doesn't seem to have any sorting for the importance of the search terms. It looks like it just returns every article that includes the terms, in whatever order is most expedient (probably newest first).

The trick to weeding out bad search results is to make sure that some of your search terms are unique (or mostly unique) to the story that you're looking for, rather than just frequent. For example, searching for Steel Ribbon returns many results (unless you use quotes), but Ribbon Alyss (or just Alyss) gives you only one.

Title and tag based searches should be both easy and quick they arn't ridiculous expectaions at all. I don't know what software is running this site but the lack of alternate story access, by author or by tag is somewhat surprising. I mean this meta data is certainly being collected and you can even sort the story list by some of them.

The example searches that started this thread where looking for a word that appears as the subject of a forum thread or the title of an article. And the complaint was that the articles so titled didn't appear until the 2nd or 3rd page of the results. So search by title would have sorted out both issues, without needing a better full text search algorithm.

From what I understand, the expectations of even a basic search engine are so great that for what we as a fanbase need to search the stories, someone has to write one. A simpler one.

Yes the one that's here would do reasonably well as an advanced search engine.

Two things:
1) Search is know broken because search breaks the Author Submit tools and has been partially turned off (see Kristin's post). This is a know, nontrivial thing to fix that breaks a basic function of the site, so turning it off is the default simple solution until Kristin has a lot of time (not kidding, maybe Christmas 2019 if bastards stop trying to break in and hack the site all the damn time).

2) There are already two seperate search sections of the site. The main "Search" field at the top that searches the Stories, and the "Search" button on the blue Forum title bar that lets you access some advanced, forum only search options.

Please don't beg for more unless you are offing to pay Kristin to give up her job and do this full time. We hate saying no and it makes us cranky to have to keep doing it over and over again for the same issue.

We don't like cranky Kristin, she steals the whiskey.

Searching for a story is easy too. The story page has a built in sorter, by title, author, hits, and date. OK date isn't the most useful and hits is pretty useless, but the author and title searches make it easy to find a story if you either of those.

Hmmm... is the site, as a whole, open to robots? Meaning, wouldn't it be easier to set up a Google custom search or something?

It's open to Google, but I've no idea if using that'd be easier.

A Google search for "March of Dreams" on the Whateleyacademy.net url gets me all stories mentioning it? Well, at least some.

And a search for "Micro", Isolated to the Forums' url: " whateleyacademy.net/index.php/forum ", also gets me results.

So, Google is crawling the site, which means something...

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: Two things:

Please don't beg for more unless you are offing to pay Kristin to give up her job and do this full time. We hate saying no and it makes us cranky to have to keep doing it over and over again for the same issue.

We don't like cranky Kristin, she steals the whiskey.

I would pay for the whiskey only I can't afford the kegs. And I've seen Kristin angry. We don't want to get Kristin angry. Even when we do steal some of her whiskey.

Kristin Darken wrote: I don't steal the whiskey. I drink the whiskey. It's not quite the same thing.

I don't think anyone wants you to return the whiskey after you drink it.