The "search" option at the toolbar along the top isn't particularly accurate. The one at the bottom right in individual forums tends to be better.
For example if I was to search for "creationism" in the top toolbar search box then you would think that the creationism v evolution thread would be no1 because it's a very busy and long thread but the 1st link is actually to the "banning paintball" thread.
Originally posted by jaden101
The "search" option at the toolbar along the top isn't particularly accurate. The one at the bottom right in individual forums tends to be better.For example if I was to search for "creationism" in the top toolbar search box then you would think that the creationism v evolution thread would be no1 because it's a very busy and long thread but the 1st link is actually to the "banning paintball" thread.
did you choose topics rather than posts?
Originally posted by jaden101
I didn't go into the advanced search bar in order to highlight my point.Surely the main, basic search bar should be sufficient to bring these things up.
i thought that was the point, though.
the normal search is a general, vague one, the advanced is for specifics.
you'd want it reversed so the default one was searching for topics instead of posts?
Originally posted by jaden101So are you wanting KMC to have a Google powered search engine? The search works the same as almost all searches on a site, it searches for the keyword that you put in and compares it to the DB for that word, if you want to narrow you search you use the advanced options. Most search tools do not have a result weighting system like the main portals.
I didn't go into the advanced search bar in order to highlight my point.Surely the main, basic search bar should be sufficient to bring these things up.
Originally posted by Raoul
i thought that was the point, though.the normal search is a general, vague one, the advanced is for specifics.
you'd want it reversed so the default one was searching for topics instead of posts?
Yes, that'd probably work better as currently the main generic search bar is throwing up a lot of irrelevant stuff.
Originally posted by jaden101I don't see how it would be irrelevant since you are searching for keywords and those keywords appear in the post. If you search by just the thread title you could also come up with irrelevant threads or not even the thread if they do not use that specific word in the title. Example: Thread title "I don't get it?" and that could be talking about how people could believe in creationism to use your example.
Yes, that'd probably work better as currently the main generic search bar is throwing up a lot of irrelevant stuff.
Originally posted by Da Pittman
I don't see how it would be irrelevant since you are searching for keywords and those keywords appear in the post. If you search by just the thread title you could also come up with irrelevant threads or not even the thread if they do not use that specific word in the title. Example: Thread title "I don't get it?" and that could be talking about how people could believe in creationism to use your example.
My previous example shows you get irrelevant stuff. If you're looking for creationism discussion and the 1st thread title you get is "banning paintball" you can easily infer that you're not going to get what you're looking for.
Another related example. Even when you know the exact title of the thread and you put it in, you don't neccesarily get what you put in.
I searched for "creationism v evolution" and one of the 1st entries I got was "ROTS Pre-Suit Vader vs. Galen Marek" which is about as irrelevant to what I searched for as can possibly be.
Originally posted by jaden101No because on the post has the word "creationism" and the title has the word "v" in it as you typed in it so this is a valid result. I typed in "Creation vs Evolution" and the first results were just that. Switching it around will do nothing because it is the search query that you would need to modify not the order of the fields that it checks. What happens when I type in "creationism v evolution" and only search the titles "Sorry, but no results were found for your search."
My previous example shows you get irrelevant stuff. If you're looking for creationism discussion and the 1st thread title you get is "banning paintball" you can easily infer that you're not going to get what you're looking for.Another related example. Even when you know the exact title of the thread and you put it in, you don't neccesarily get what you put in.
I searched for "creationism v evolution" and one of the 1st entries I got was "ROTS Pre-Suit Vader vs. Galen Marek" which is about as irrelevant to what I searched for as can possibly be.
The search query would need to be broken up into the different strings to give each word a weight value unless you specify that you are looking for the exact phrase which this tool is not using the search operators such as Google. I'm sure that it is using a simple MySQL query like SELECT * FROM table WHERE title LIKE '%search term%' OR post LIKE '%search term%'. There would be more to the script but that is the basic principle, you would also need to chunk the search term to get back more results.