How often do you think people use the 'Newer Than' option in the search box?

[Stuart Wright]

I don't think I've ever used it.
Is it necessary?

 

[AndyB]

I don't think I've ever used it.

I've never used it either.

 

[Cthulhux]

Neither have I, I think the more interesting button is "since my last visit" (which I use daily).

 

[FredC]

Never. I think I might have considered using it once. But that's about as far as that thought got.

 

[Martok]

I've used it a couple of times when searching for something more recent and therefore wanted to exclude older posts. Having it there isn't a problem though even if you don't use it.

 

[empire]

I hid the option with css. If search results are sorted by date anyway, I don't see the point.

I thought perhaps it might be less intensive on the site to limit it, but I'd be surprised if enough people used it to make an impact.

 

[Amaury]

Honestly, I think it'd be nice to even have an older than option.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Thanks for the replies. Interesting that most replies echo my thoughts.
We've been thinking about content discovery on Xenforo.
The default search is aimed at finding threads and posts. But now there are more types of content available to find, like resources and media, and on AVForums we also have user reviews, competitions and from editorial, news, reviews and articles, I think maybe we need a better way to find this content.
I am somewhat inspired by the search box on http://www.giantbomb.com/ which has an optional settings drop-down plus Ajax results.
Is that better than Xenforo's default search, do you think?

 

[Xon]

I am somewhat inspired by the search box on http://www.giantbomb.com/ which has an optional settings drop-down plus Ajax results.
Is that better than Xenforo's default search, do you think?

The search-as-you-type is definitely a interesting feature to have, and the ajax dropdown for types is quite useful.

 

[EQnoble]

Is that better than Xenforo's default search, do you think?

The search-as-you-type is definitely a interesting feature to have, and the ajax dropdown for types is quite useful.

But what will this do to your site owner with a small forum and server. If on every onkeyup event the server has to work and send results back I could see this being unusable by many people unless some serious legwork is done to come up with a format that plays well for everyone.

While the implementation works and has some appeal, I am pretty sure that is worked up for that site and not a one size fits all type of thing, and I am not sure this can be made to work in a one size fits all sort of way on various levels of hosting but for the person who has a server and the bandwidth for it...it certainly can keep visitors by providing them what they are looking for in an instant gratification kind of way.

At any rate I don't really think the two are comparable as xf has to do something that can work for all people who meet server requirements and that site only has to worry about what it can support for itself, oranges and applesauce and all that but in a perfect world those real time results could be useful for those who could run it without killing their server.

 

[CTXMedia]

But what will this do to your site owner with a small forum and server. If on every onkeyup event the server has to work and send results back I could see this being unusable by many people unless some serious legwork is done to come up with a format that plays well for everyone.
....
At any rate I don't really think the two are comparable as xf has to do something that can work for all people who meet server requirements and that site only has to worry about what it can support for itself, oranges and applesauce and all that but in a perfect world those real time results could be useful for those who could run it without killing their server.

Just make it an extension / feature of XFES.

Regular members won't have to use it (or worry about server overhead) - and those who do want to use it will already be accepting that they need the additional server resources required to run XFES (so it won't be a deal breaker).

I don't think I've ever used it.

Nope - can't say I've ever used it either.

 

[EQnoble]

Your logic has some logic to it.

 

[Mouth]

There's a search box?

 

[TheBigK]

I really think the search box should get an upgrade in XF 2. No one likes options! The search box should automatically fetch the most relevant results from existing and other forums. Ever since Google became popular; no one really likes multiple options while performing search.

 

[Stuart Wright]

I really think the search box should get an upgrade in XF 2. No one likes options! The search box should automatically fetch the most relevant results from existing and other forums. Ever since Google became popular; no one really likes multiple options while performing search.

Couldn't disagree more.
If the forum is part of a larger website and/or has other content besides threads, then the user needs options to specify what they are looking for. Do they want threads, media or resources? Or something else?
By default, the options drop-down doesn't have to appear, and the search results include everything.
But if the user wants to find only a certain type of content, it's useful to be able to specify that.
I like to be able to search for only specific content types and I don't want to go to the advanced search page to do it.

^ [shudders]

We on AVForums want to use ES to weight the search results so that items in our products table are returned with the highest priority, then reviews, news and articles, then user reviews, then competitions, then threads.
I'm told this is not easy.

 

[TheBigK]

To each his own. I've had multiple complaints from people that the search box is bit complicated to use. We now use Audentio's theme that simplifies the search box to a great extent.

 

[Daniel Hood]

We on AVForums want to use ES to weight the search results so that items in our products table are returned with the highest priority, then reviews, news and articles, then user reviews, then competitions, then threads.

This is a little ways off from the original topic... but... it actually wouldn't be that difficult. It would require rebuilding your whole search index though and making a change to every search handler class that you use on your site.

Basically you'd want to make a "_priority" type field and have products be 100, reviews 90, news and articles 80, etc (I'm leaving gaps to allow more content types to squeeze in later if you want). Then you would have to switch the scripting that XenForo uses. Currently it's something like:

_score / pow(2.0F, min(10.0F * halflife, abs(now - doc['date'].value)) / halflife)

something more like

_score * doc['priority'].value / pow(2.0F, min(10.0F * halflife, abs(now - doc['date'].value)) / halflife)

Should suffice.

 

[Stuart Wright]

making a change to every search handler class that you use on your site

How many are in Xenforo?

 

[Daniel Hood]

How many are in Xenforo?

By default, I believe 4. With your add-ons though, it looks like you have more like 10, give or take.

 

[thedude]

I've used the Newer Than feature a handful of times, but the average user most likely hasn't.

On a related note, what we've done on our sites is made the "Search this forum only" option default to unchecked. On any site with more than a handful of subforums, wanting to restrict your search to just the forum you're in at the moment is almost certainly the exception, rather than the rule.