More intuitive search/advanced search

[Mr Lucky]

This is a tricky suggestion because I no longer find it an issue, it was something a user brought up. It doesn't bother me because I'm used to it I suppose, but the point of usability is things should be intuitive for people who are new to a feature.

So, thinking about it from that POV, ie coming to the search function with no previous knowledge I can see it isn't quite intuitive.

There is a form and two buttons:



Again approaching it naively a user might put in a search word and think that they have the choice of Search or Advanced Search.

There is nothing to indicate that Search works with the form fileld above, yet that Advanced Search is merely a link button that opens up a whole other big multi function form.

I do remember when first using this type of search I did add w rod, then click on Advanced.

I'm not quite sure of the solution, and I know many people will think there is no problem - because they know how it works. But I think it does need to be clearer but without having to write a whole instruction manual.

It would look messy to explain the buttons have complete different functions. Or maybe it's as simple as changing the first button phrase to "Submit the search from" ???

So I apologise that my suggestion is not a straightforward "why not do this?" it's more of a "needs to be more intuitive but I can't yet think of exactly how to solve it yet."

 

[Kirby]

But that's not XF's fault, and I think it's ridiculous to expect web-search-level inference from forum search software. So in that context, I see absolutely nothing wrong with XF search.

You are absolutely right that it is ridiculous to expect forum integrated search to produce reults like major search engines.

That being said, I think there definitly is room for (not too complicated) improvement for XFES by leveraging more features of Elasticsearch:

1. Add support for decompounding. Especially for german this would temendously improve search result quality
2. Add support for boosting exact matches
3. Add support fo synonyms
4. Add support for custom stopwords

Has any community software ever done a good job of search ?

I don't think so.

That being said, XF search isn't thaaat bad - you just have to know pretty much exactly what you are searching for.
If you do know that you will most likely find that content.

 

[Arnox]

I like to use the example of searching for Xenporta here at Xenforo.com

Ok, but when I search for just "xenp" in the Resources section, it finds it immediately, though admittedly, it is the fourth result in the list. Should it have boosted that fourth result up to first ranked due to it having the more simple title, and if I'm in the Resources section, should it have restricted my search by default to be only in Resources? Sure. But I think this is nitpicking in the end.

 

[Digital Doctor]

The answer to this problem should have some manual solutions.

Step 1) record all searches in a long
Step 2) see what people search for.
Step 3) deliver practical solutions to help them.

or use Google search to replace Native Xenforo search.

 

[Alpha1]

IMHO there should be a big search bar. Once clicked make it bigger and put a gradient of the rest of the screen. Search should search all content type by default and have filters for content types / thread types and faceted search to drill down the search results.

Thread 'Access to "faceted" search please!'

Mar 14, 2013

I am keen to get access to Elasticsearch facets

To have CNET style search facets.

Examples below:

See LinkedIn screen shot in this article

http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/api/search/facets/

Another good explanation here

http://www.uie.com/articles/faceted_search/

And here

http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/2011/05/13/data-visualization-with-elasticsearch-and-protovis.html

And here

http://clojureelasticsearch.info/articles/facets.html

Thanks

• Hoolio
• Replies: 15
• Forum: Enhanced Search suggestions

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Thread 'Synonym support for XF Search'

Aug 30, 2013

There is a lot of difference between the effectiveness of the XenForo search engine and Google. Google is simply so much better and effective in finding what you need on a XenForo website. IMO it's a difference of night and day.
The main reason is that Google finds synonyms and paraphrasing. The XenForo search function does not.

Please add support for synonyms to XenForo.

Elastic Search allows webmaster to define specific synonyms so the functionality is there. The issue is that it does not have a list of millions of synonym definitions included and there is no way for a webmaster to...

• Alpha1
• Replies: 13
• Forum: Enhanced Search suggestions

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