New search facility.
Discussion
Morning!
So the old search was a bit clunky, not that accurate and was causing issues elsewhere on the site. So the decision was made to turn it into a google search facility, which is much more accurate and saves people going to google and typing in "site
istonheads.com *search term*" etc.
Apologies if you're not a fan of it, but hopefully you'll see it as a slight upgrade eventually. I've been using google to search the site for a long time now and it works much better than the old forum search!
So the old search was a bit clunky, not that accurate and was causing issues elsewhere on the site. So the decision was made to turn it into a google search facility, which is much more accurate and saves people going to google and typing in "site
istonheads.com *search term*" etc.Apologies if you're not a fan of it, but hopefully you'll see it as a slight upgrade eventually. I've been using google to search the site for a long time now and it works much better than the old forum search!
midenginedcoupe has nailed it ^
Whilst we'd love to build out a much better search experience (and it is in our backlog!), we don't currently have the resource to put that significant amount of development effort into it at this time given our other priorities.
The decision to remove it in favour of a site specific Google search was done for a mix of reasons including:
- the underlying search technology hadn't been properly invested in for a while and was beginning to introduce risk into other parts of PH
- there is a significant cost in running/maintaining/patching this infrastructure which wasn't providing much end user value
- the search UX was pretty bad... to the point where our man Jack, (and other forum users) have been directing folks to a Google search for a long time
And finally, yes search is hard, and when we tackle this we want to be in a position to do it right rather than patching on an existing older, flakey component.
Until then, yep, we're leveraging Google's rather decent search offering!
Whilst we'd love to build out a much better search experience (and it is in our backlog!), we don't currently have the resource to put that significant amount of development effort into it at this time given our other priorities.
The decision to remove it in favour of a site specific Google search was done for a mix of reasons including:
- the underlying search technology hadn't been properly invested in for a while and was beginning to introduce risk into other parts of PH
- there is a significant cost in running/maintaining/patching this infrastructure which wasn't providing much end user value
- the search UX was pretty bad... to the point where our man Jack, (and other forum users) have been directing folks to a Google search for a long time
And finally, yes search is hard, and when we tackle this we want to be in a position to do it right rather than patching on an existing older, flakey component.
Until then, yep, we're leveraging Google's rather decent search offering!
While the old search was certainly frustrating, the new one is much worse IMO. In particular, the lack of ability to narrow the search down to specific sections of the board makes it much more difficult to find stuff when you're looking for a common term.
For example I just wanted to comment on the TV series "Hidden", and as you can image, that brings up quite a few hits. Being able to narrow it down to the TV section would have helped a lot.
That said, it's based on Google and the quality of their search results seems to have dropped considerably over the last few years - too many people know how to spoof the listings now and get their sites into results where they should not. Hard to know whether they don't "fix" it because it's really difficult, or because it would cut their earnings.
For example I just wanted to comment on the TV series "Hidden", and as you can image, that brings up quite a few hits. Being able to narrow it down to the TV section would have helped a lot.
That said, it's based on Google and the quality of their search results seems to have dropped considerably over the last few years - too many people know how to spoof the listings now and get their sites into results where they should not. Hard to know whether they don't "fix" it because it's really difficult, or because it would cut their earnings.
droopsnoot said:
While the old search was certainly frustrating, the new one is much worse IMO. In particular, the lack of ability to narrow the search down to specific sections of the board makes it much more difficult to find stuff when you're looking for a common term.
For example I just wanted to comment on the TV series "Hidden", and as you can image, that brings up quite a few hits. Being able to narrow it down to the TV section would have helped a lot.
Out of curiosity I just searched for 'Hidden TV series' and, as you found, it's the second link in the list.For example I just wanted to comment on the TV series "Hidden", and as you can image, that brings up quite a few hits. Being able to narrow it down to the TV section would have helped a lot.
808 Estate said:
Why not just buy XenForo or something similar. Lots of off the shelf forum software available that has all the extras you will ever need and works well.
Because this is a custom script made many years ago. How do you import the massive amount of data from it to something else?Answer - you can't without writing a custom import script which would be a huge undertaking.
It's not like you can buy a new forum script, press a few buttons and hey presto! It doesn't work like that.
Edited by zarjaz1991 on Tuesday 3rd March 22:01
zarjaz1991 said:
Because this is a custom script made many tears ago. How do you import the massive amount of data from it to something else?
Answer - you can't without writing a custom import script which would be a huge undertaking.
It's not like you can buy a new forum script, press a few buttons and hey presto! It doesn't work like that.
Many tears ago? If ever there were a more appropriate phraseAnswer - you can't without writing a custom import script which would be a huge undertaking.
It's not like you can buy a new forum script, press a few buttons and hey presto! It doesn't work like that.
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