Threadloom Search for XenForo 1.5.x [Deleted]

I'm guessing the site was still work in progress. The extended explanation at the bottom of the table mentioned "Search quality", so yeah it got me weird that in the table it was crossed.
Also there were some XenForo boards in the scrolling thingy in the home page:
http://monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/threadloom/search
http://www.themouthpiece.com/forum/threadloom/search
http://www.twinstuff.com/forums/threadloom/search
in addition, mine: https://www.endlesshorizon.net/threadloom/search?query=anime (w/ some personal touch)
 
Gonna try this out. Still using MySQL search w/ 1.25m posts. Maybe this will be a nice upgrade, not that the current search is bad.
 
To be honest I find your "comparison" chart to be wrong and missleading on quite a few points. That alone puts me off even giving your product a try.

@Slavik: Apologies, it was wrong on several points. Some of my earlier edits were incorrectly published. Can you take another look and let me know which ones are incorrect so I can fix it? Thanks.
 
@Slavik: Apologies, it was wrong on several points. Some of my earlier edits were incorrectly published. Can you take another look and let me know which ones are incorrect so I can fix it? Thanks.

Real time indexing - The search index for all XF content is updated on insert, unless you want to delve right into the deep technicalities of ElasticSearch but then we are still talking such a moot point as it doesnt require a sphinx-style rebuild and is available within hundredths of a second. Arguably quicker than the latency to your servers potentially.

Resource Efficiency - Again a very vague and smoke and mirrors point, I assume you are referring to that offloading the search to your server makes the web server more efficient. The same could be done for any service. (Eg, using Elastic.co's ElasticSearch as a Service)

Zero Maintenance - ElasticSearch again once configured correctly is zero maintenance. Likewise you could use the ElasticSearch as a Service and it would be zero maintenance for the site owner.

High Availability - ElasticSearch is easily clustered and HA capable.
 
I find each search item takes up too much vertical space resulting in very low information density.

upload_2016-8-21_21-3-49.webp
upload_2016-8-21_21-24-48.webp

In this example, I was forum searching .... so the filter by forum .... won't have any use.

I tried clicking on the [x] as seen below
upload_2016-8-21_21-5-55.webp
I assumed that clicking the [x] would run a new search instantly without the search item I "closed". It didnt.

What I did really like was being able to add a new search term to my current results.
upload_2016-8-21_21-7-59.webp

In this search ...
upload_2016-8-21_21-11-48.webp
I clicked on "Community Showcase" - which was this link. https://theadminzone.com/threadloom/search?query=forum:540. I expected to be taken to forum 540. https://theadminzone.com/forums/community-showcase.540/. I think this is an error.

One nice touch would be to support avatars in the search results like Native Xenforo Searching. It would make it feel more "integrated".

Suggestion: consider styling search results much more like default xenforo. If they look the same people probably wont even notice the change :)
 
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I did notice I could bypass threadloom by clicking on the magnifying glass.
upload_2016-8-21_21-18-17.webp

I found that helpful as I like to be able to choose which search method suits my task.
 
Some clickable items don't feel clickable (ie. no action happens other than the hand).
upload_2016-8-21_21-21-39.webp
Underlining the whole text seems too much. Maybe bold it ? Shade the whole area ?
Like is often done in Xenforo.
upload_2016-8-21_21-27-10.webp
 
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the 4 items listed dont feel clickable.
they are though.
They are clickable on my site. The cursor changed into pointer which shown they were clickable, and when I clicked any of them, it actually led me to the actual post.

Or were you asking for an effect when the item is hovered? If so, yeah, I guess it's a pretty good idea. Bold doesn't sound good though, it'll obviously increase each line's width and sometimes cause lines to take more space when hovered (the item container's height will then increase sometimes and cause everything below it to drop down - but only when hovered, so I'm quite sure that won't be a pleasant effect to look at). And based on the current design, changing background effect doesn't seem good as well. I honestly think that underlining them will do though.
 
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Real time indexing - The search index for all XF content is updated on insert, unless you want to delve right into the deep technicalities of ElasticSearch but then we are still talking such a moot point as it doesnt require a sphinx-style rebuild and is available within hundredths of a second. Arguably quicker than the latency to your servers potentially.

Resource Efficiency - Again a very vague and smoke and mirrors point, I assume you are referring to that offloading the search to your server makes the web server more efficient. The same could be done for any service. (Eg, using Elastic.co's ElasticSearch as a Service)

Zero Maintenance - ElasticSearch again once configured correctly is zero maintenance. Likewise you could use the ElasticSearch as a Service and it would be zero maintenance for the site owner.

High Availability - ElasticSearch is easily clustered and HA capable.

Hi @Slavik, thanks for clarifying XFES real-time - I appreciate it. I updated the chart accordingly.

On resource efficiency and availability, I’d take your point even further and say that these are benefits not just of hosted search, but of any enterprise-grade cloud service. That said, I don’t think general hosted elasticsearch is comparable to the other solutions in the table b/c it’s not readily available to integrate w/ XF in a turnkey fashion. Even then, while hosted elasticsearch is easier to set up and maintain than rolling your own cluster, it’s far from maintenance-free.

TCS is designed for forum owners who want a modern forum search engine that is as easy to install as most XF plug-ins, and who never want to worry about responding to availability alerts, allocating search-related server resources, restarting their indexer or search service, or rebuilding their index. If someone is willing to set up her/his own hosted elasticsearch cluster and create a custom plug-in and UI to power search on her/his XF site, well … please introduce me to her/him so we can interview them. :)

PS I forwarded your feedback to our team, and one of our team members suggested that even though it isn't turnkey, that we mark resource efficiency and availability w/ 1/2 (?) marks to indicate that there is a scenario where this is possible.
 
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I find each search item takes up too much vertical space resulting in very low information density.

View attachment 139534

In this example, I was forum searching .... so the filter by forum .... won't have any use.

I tried clicking on the [x] as seen below
View attachment 139535
I assumed that clicking the [x] would run a new search instantly without the search item I "closed". It didnt.

What I did really like was being able to add a new search term to my current results.
View attachment 139536

In this search ...
View attachment 139537
I clicked on "Community Showcase" - which was this link. https://theadminzone.com/threadloom/search?query=forum:540. I expected to be taken to forum 540. https://theadminzone.com/forums/community-showcase.540/. I think this is an error.

One nice touch would be to support avatars in the search results like Native Xenforo Searching. It would make it feel more "integrated".

Suggestion: consider styling search results much more like default xenforo. If they look the same people probably wont even notice the change :)

Thanks for the feedback, @Digital Doctor. Lots of great stuff in here. I'll forward this on to our team for review, but a few comments in the meantime:
  • We don't requery when a user removes a pill because we don't yet support instant search, and without that, requerying on every edit would probably annoy the heck out of someone making more significant edits to the query. That said, we do have a number of things we want to do to improve interactions with the pills.
  • The forum breadcrumb click target isn't an error. It requeries for results from that forum. But this is helpful feedback on the UI. If it turns out that most people expect to be able to navigate to the forum thread list view, we should probably take people there directly.
  • We debated whether to include avatars in the UI. (I'll add this to our system as a vote for avatars.) We left them out in this version b/c past search experiments I've seen have mixed results when you includes avatars or mini-images in them. They work ok when you've got high coverage (95%+) and they mean something to most people who are searching; but when you don't have those, the tradeoff in real estate looks less clear. We'll probably revisit this before we go out for General Availability.
Thanks for the feedback on styling.
 
They are clickable on my site. The cursor changed into pointer which shown they were clickable, and when I clicked any of them, it actually led me to the actual post.

Or were you asking for an effect when the item is hovered? If so, yeah, I guess it's a pretty good idea. Bold doesn't sound good though, it'll obviously increase each line's width and sometimes cause lines to take more space when hovered (the item container's height will then increase sometimes and cause everything below it to drop down - but only when hovered, so I'm quite sure that won't be a pleasant effect to look at). And based on the current design, changing background effect doesn't seem good as well. I honestly think that underlining them will do though.

Thanks @Digital Doctor and @BobbyWibowo. I agree that underlining on hover might work as well.
 
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