Teapot
Well-known member
This suggestion may seem a little weird, but bear with me!
Recently, I went digging in my database and found the list of search queries in the xf_search table. To my surprise, a good chunk of them were searches for navigation items – in my case, our headline "Trainer Card Maker" application, which is built as a XenForo add-on, is clearly there in our top navigation bar, but is by far the most commonly searched for term using XF's search engine.
While I don't know how people are missing the navigation and deciding to search instead, it would be really useful if navigation entries (presumably the navigation tabs in the new XF2 system) and nodes could show up in the search results, so that searching for the blind obvious still produces a useful result. To return to my Trainer Card Maker example, searching for it returns lots of results for people talking about it, but no result for the actual application itself.
Given the same thing happens with nodes too, the second half of my suggestion is to ensure that all nodes (or at least all those selected to appear in the forum list) are also indexable and visible when searching for them. If someone searches for our help and feedback board, for example, I'd want them to be able to find it.
According to the data I have on my community, these two seemingly tiny and meaningless changes would actually make a fair difference to the usability of our site, as odd as it may seem!
Recently, I went digging in my database and found the list of search queries in the xf_search table. To my surprise, a good chunk of them were searches for navigation items – in my case, our headline "Trainer Card Maker" application, which is built as a XenForo add-on, is clearly there in our top navigation bar, but is by far the most commonly searched for term using XF's search engine.
While I don't know how people are missing the navigation and deciding to search instead, it would be really useful if navigation entries (presumably the navigation tabs in the new XF2 system) and nodes could show up in the search results, so that searching for the blind obvious still produces a useful result. To return to my Trainer Card Maker example, searching for it returns lots of results for people talking about it, but no result for the actual application itself.
Given the same thing happens with nodes too, the second half of my suggestion is to ensure that all nodes (or at least all those selected to appear in the forum list) are also indexable and visible when searching for them. If someone searches for our help and feedback board, for example, I'd want them to be able to find it.
According to the data I have on my community, these two seemingly tiny and meaningless changes would actually make a fair difference to the usability of our site, as odd as it may seem!
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