Searching Classifieds... its rubbish

[redgriff500]

I regularly look in the classifieds and its most frustrating... am I missing something or is it just rubbish ?

1) Search for a keyword like 'LPG' it misses out loads of ads that are there if you scroll through the sections.

2) If regularly searching I will ask it to list by age so I'm not re reading the old ads... yet it doesn't get them in order... I think its to do with some being 'premium' and some not but its a ridiculous situation.

3) If I want say an M3 or a Skyline I have to re enter all my options ie 100 miles from B91 up to £8000 etc can't I save my details like I can on Auto Trader ? Of course if the keyword search worked this wouldn't be so annoying.

Thanks

[Mr Will]

redgriff500 said:

I regularly look in the classifieds and its most frustrating... am I missing something or is it just rubbish ?

There are ways of doing most things, but we are aware that it is not great, especially in terms of user friendliness, so we are planning to make improvements to it in the near future.

redgriff500 said:

1) Search for a keyword like 'LPG' it misses out loads of ads that are there if you scroll through the sections.

The keyword search only searches titles, and searches for the exact phrase entered, so if you type in 'BMW LPG' then it won't match 'BMW 540i LPG'. It will accept % as a wildcard, so you can search for 'BMW%LPG' which will match BMW, then anything, then LPG but unfortunately won't match 'LPG BMW'. Unfortunately this means it is generally best to only use one keyword at a time, which we understand is far from ideal.

redgriff500 said:

2) If regularly searching I will ask it to list by age so I'm not re reading the old ads... yet it doesn't get them in order... I think its to do with some being 'premium' and some not but its a ridiculous situation.

Premium Ads are a way for forum members and paying punters to get more exposure for their adverts. they appear in front of the standard adverts in the category, so if you sort the adverts by age, you will get the newest premium advert, all the way up to the oldest premium advert, then the standard adverts in order after that. If you only want to look at recent ads then you can use the search or filter tools to just look at adverts added in the last 24 hours, 3 days, 1 week, etc.

redgriff500 said:

3) If I want say an M3 or a Skyline I have to re enter all my options ie 100 miles from B91 up to £8000 etc can't I save my details like I can on Auto Trader ? Of course if the keyword search worked this wouldn't be so annoying.

We don't have a way of saving your searches, but it is possible to search more than one category at the same time.

Just hold Ctrl when clicking on the categories in the advanced search and it will let you highlight and search more than one.

Hope this makes things a bit easier for you, and if you have any features you would like adding to the next version of the search then feel free to suggest them. We will take any comments on board and do our best to include them.

[miniman]

http://lucene.apache.org/solr/