What improvements does ES add to your forum

[Frode789]

For those who run it: What specific things does it add, that you could not have lived without? Just trying to get some overview about what things it improves XF on, that could be useful.

 

[Mendalla]

Have you read this? It covers what will be in the new version of ES for 2.2. I am actually contemplating ES just based on this.

ES 2.2 - Enhanced Search 2.2 - Similar Threads

In the beginning, XenForo Enhanced Search (XFES) was intended to be a simple drop-in replacement for MySQL full text search, primarily aimed at large forums whose operation would potentially suffer when attempting to search very large database tables. As a drop-in, XFES only made use of the...

xenforo.com

 

[Chromaniac]

Same. I have been managing just fine without XFES all this time but the devs have finally added functionality that relies on ES to work in 2.2 that is forcing me to look into getting it.

For now, I assume it improves the performance of the search results. Enables you to have search results sorted by relevance instead of just dates. Plus I believe it also lets you search between two particular dates which is not possible with MySQL search iirc.

If you are just looking for improving search results for your users, consider getting Threadloom. It is working very well on my board.

Threadloom Search for XenForo 2.x

Threadloom Search provides an easy way to upgrade your forum with cloud search. It returns 10x as many results as XenForo search. It also gives you image search, spell correction, and WordPress search. We are happy to provide this service free...

xenforo.com

 

[Paul B]

The primary reason for XFES is MySQL has an upper limit of ~ 1 million posts.

Above that, performance may be affected.

However, XFES offers many features that MySQL search doesn't, such as stemming, a customisable stop word list, no minimum search term length, weighting, relevance, as well as the features mentioned above.