Search Behaving Badly

[casportpony]

Just now I was trying to find some posts made by HEChicken and this is what happened.

This search only found one message when I clicked here:

Then I tried this and got the same thing.

These also produce just one item.

But if I search in just threads I get what I think is probably correct.

 

[threadloom]

Hi everyone, we're grateful to power search on BackYard Chickens. This is an amazing community, and we love keeping up with what @Nifty-Chicken is doing here.

I realize the above examples were about native forum search, but wanted to chime in on the Threadloom-specific questions.

@aart:

• Advanced Search always goes to native forum search (XenForo).
• If you click "Make default" on the search results page, it will change your default search engine from the dropdown. Other functions that use search, like recent postings on the member profile page, will continue to use native forum search.

@azygous: A few differences between native forum search and Google, vs. Threadloom Search:

• Threadloom searches over all posts, whereas Google and native forum search only search over a smaller set. For example, Threadloom will find, rank, and let you filter amongst 1.4M posts for the search [coop], Google finds 216K, and native forum search finds ~500.
• When you use the forum filter, the forums are sorted by the most matches, and the numbers next to the forum names are the number of results in each forum that match your search query.

• Image search, which will also try to analyze the image even if the word you're searching for isn't in the name of the file or the text of the post.

• And spell correction, which for fun also works with brand and celebrity names.

Happy to provide more detail, but don't want to take up too much airtime, so will wrap with the following link which details search features for power users:

https://support.threadloom.com/hc/e...at-types-of-searches-does-Threadloom-support-
Thanks!

Paul at Threadloom

 

[aart]

I'm a cranky old woman and use that information to discount what I say. But I think the BYC search feature has always been and still remains one of the most disappointing things I endure about this website.

Another cranky old woman....the search has never been great here, since I joined in 2012.
Now it's easier to just use google than explain the deficiencies.
I've found some work-arounds, mostly just adjusting my expectations.

 

[threadloom]

Still doesn't seem to work for finding just posts by a certain member tho....
...maybe they are still working on that?

This was an unintended bug when we fixed the issue where search within a thread wasn't working (yes, that was fixed recently). We're working on fixing this and bringing this back.

 

[threadloom]

This was an unintended bug when we fixed the issue where search within a thread wasn't working (yes, that was fixed recently). We're working on fixing this and bringing this back.

Brief update: We have committed the fix and are currently testing it. I’ll post another update when the fix has been released and is live on BYC. Apologies for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.

 

[threadloom]

@aart and @casportpony Thanks for helping us identify this new bug. We've replicated it on our side and think we've found the fix. We're testing and I'll update when we've pushed a new release.

@casportpony Thanks for the "last" button bug report. For some reason, clicking on last is resulting in repeating the username in the user filter field in the URL. Let me ask our team to take a closer look. Hopefully, we can fix this one faster.

Thanks for your patience,

Paul

 

[Nifty-Chicken]

We're working on the initial issue that @casportpony reported, and hope to have that fixed soon.

Regarding general search issues. It looks like the issues are with the default BYC search.

I'd like to request that @aart @azygous and any other members having a bad search experience do the following:

1. Go to the Threadloom search: https://www.backyardchickens.com/threadloom/
2. Type in your search query and get the results
3. If you didn't get what you wanted / expected, please reply with:
   1. The search phrase
   2. What you were expecting (maybe a specific thread, etc.)
   3. If Google or whatever other search you use instead, provides a better result for BYC, and what it was.

We can't do much to change the default search, but I know the developers of Threadloom and they are very open to feedback... but to even begin to start improving things, they will need as many specific examples as possible... otherwise, it's like going to the Dr., and when he/she asks you what's wrong, all you say is, "It hurts" and then walk out the door

 

[threadloom]

Thanks for the update!

No problem, thanks for your patience. We're done testing and are releasing the updated plug-in shortly. We'll let @Nifty-Chicken know when it's available for admins to download.

 

[aart]

Worked for member(me) posts in 'this thread'!
Woot!

 

[azygous]

I'm a cranky old woman and use that information to discount what I say. But I think the BYC search feature has always been and still remains one of the most disappointing things I endure about this website. Second only to the BYC store, which is a torture chamber that I will not subject myself to until a major revamp has made it customer friendly. (Note to James: take a hint from Amazon.)