"Community Content"-Only search

[Markus_McCloud]

Hello, everyone. Markus again, this time with a big gripe of mine: when I use the search function, it searches the whole website. Why is this so bad? If you're looking for a ship or station you saw before, you'll naturally want to return to it to download it or give your review. Naturally, you'll search for it... Uh oh, your search was so generic, it brought up a bunch of unrelated posts!

For instance, I was looking for a new abandoned station to add to my collection. I type in "abandoned station"... and get a bunch of forum posts about how shipwrecks need to be added! Why is this brought up? Because someone commented they'd work similar to abandoned stations, and the search picked up on that.

My reaction?

"Oh come on! I just want a new derelict to explore and discover!"

Here's a solution: add a secondary search bar into the "Community Content" section, one that only searches user submissions! Rather than having to fiddle with Advanced Search, users can just use the second search bar to find, say, the updated Shangri-La (great submission, by the way) without hearing jack-crap about an arbitrary thread or post that mentions "abandoned stations".
[DOUBLEPOST=1466800083,1466799935][/DOUBLEPOST] Like I said, this is a personal gripe I have with the current search.

 

[Megacrafter127]

Already done, although not easily visible.
When opening the normal search bar, on the very right end of it, there should be a cog. Clicking it will bring up a search menu:

Clicking on 'More...' will bring up the full search page:

 

[Markus_McCloud]

Thank you... but couldn't they have that option out in the open? I imagine people would use it on an everyday basis; shouldn't it have a version in plain sight, similar to how dA has a "full-site" search and an "artist" search?

 

[DukeofRealms]

Or, if you click on the Community Content page, click search and click the cog....

 

[Croquelune]

But Markus still marks 1 point cause the actual search system pretty sucks hard.

At the moment: either it rakes overly broad and therefore brings us all a bunch of crap (Markus's case), or either you tick one of these advocated boxes to clarify the search and there it sorts it all with a flamethrower... so it no longer brings us nothing.

An easy test. I looked for the result of "fleetsubmission" since Criss's challenge bring something like 70+ submissions. It was really an easy task for the search system since :

1. I knew what I'm looking for (so it don't have to guess it)
   
2. I knew where I'm looking for (same it don't have to guess it)
3. Since the "fleetsubmission" part was a requirements for the Criss's challenge entries there were plenty of really existing results

But it eventually manage anyhow to totally failed it.

Spoiler: Here the front page of Community Content without search

We can already expect to see MrFuz's and Top4ce's submission in the result of the search and not see all the rest including the "DSY Type-SPT-Riva Shuttle" which are out of topic things.

But look the result for my "fleetsubmission" search without using advanced mode (just using the search bar from the CC page)

We got the shuttle thing at 1st result (just because the guy speak about it was part of his fleet submission in description) and SkylordLuke's one. That the one and only 2 results that I got (and one of them shouldn't be there imo). It's really few compare on the 70+ concretly existent result.

Then let's search with "search title only" option ticked too.

Mmmmm'k.

Conclusion the actual search system is totally unreliable and useless.
In this example I took a really easy task like "fleetsubmission" where I knew what I'm looking for, where I'm looking for and that results were existent. But the search system was unable to handle it.
So then I have to speak about my somewhat vague searches when I was looking for some hypothetical specific ship but got no result. My first thinking was "Shich SM community sucks they didn't made that yet !!?" but then I had understood it wasn't mean the thing I looked for didn't exist yet it just the search system is unable to reach it cause it's a blind hound.

So yes at the moment it's really hard to find things in Starmadedock. And that terrible search system is one of the reason(but not the only) why there are so much duplicated thread.

 

[DukeofRealms]

But Markus still marks 1 point cause the actual search system pretty sucks hard.

At the moment: either it rakes overly broad and therefore brings us all a bunch of crap (Markus's case), or either you tick one of these advocated boxes to clarify the search and there it sorts it all with a flamethrower... so it no longer brings us nothing.

An easy test. I looked for the result of "fleetsubmission" since Criss's challenge bring something like 70+ submissions. It was really an easy task for the search system since :

1. I knew what I'm looking for (so it don't have to guess it)
   
2. I knew where I'm looking for (same it don't have to guess it)
3. Since the "fleetsubmission" part was a requirements for the Criss's challenge entries there were plenty of really existing results

But it eventually manage anyhow to totally failed it.

Spoiler: Here the front page of Community Content without search

We can already expect to see MrFuz's and Top4ce's submission in the result of the search and not see all the rest including the "DSY Type-SPT-Riva Shuttle" which are out of topic things.

But look the result for my "fleetsubmission" search without using advanced mode (just using the search bar from the CC page)

We got the shuttle thing at 1st result (just because the guy speak about it was part of his fleet submission in description) and SkylordLuke's one. That the one and only 2 results that I got (and one of them shouldn't be there imo). It's really few compare on the 70+ concretly existent result.

Then let's search with "search title only" option ticked too.

Mmmmm'k.

Conclusion the actual search system is totally unreliable and useless.
In this example I took a really easy task like "fleetsubmission" where I knew what I'm looking for, where I'm looking for and that results were existent. But the search system was unable to handle it.
So then I have to speak about my somewhat vague searches when I was looking for some hypothetical specific ship but got no result. My first thinking was "Shich SM community sucks they didn't made that yet !!?" but then I had understood it wasn't mean the thing I looked for didn't exist yet it just the search system is unable to reach it cause it's a blind hound.

So yes at the moment it's really hard to find things in Starmadedock. And that terrible search system is one of the reason(but not the only) why there are so much duplicated thread.

This is actually because the search module is under maintenance at the moment. So, that isn't the reason why there are always duplicate threads

 

[Markus_McCloud]

This is actually because the search module is under maintenance at the moment. So, that isn't the reason why there are always duplicate threads

So you're working on it? Good; I'd hate for people to get frustrated because they don't know how to search for their favorite ship series.

Just as a thought, though: couldn't you add directions at the top of the Community Content page until then? It seems to be a quick fix until you place something more permanent.

The reason I bring this up is because people instinctively turn to the search bar to find what they're looking for, and if it happens to be a ship (and their search isn't bringing up any), then the search feature isn't doing its job.

 

[DukeofRealms]

An easy test. I looked for the result of "fleetsubmission" since Criss's challenge bring something like 70+ submissions. It was really an easy task for the search system since :

I've been working on search today, and I missed the term you actually searched when first responding. You used "fleetsubmission", one word, no identifiers (space, underscore, hyphen...).

This search term is actually very hard for a search engine to process. How is the search supposed to know where a word ends and where one begins? Without a huge set of data (like Google might have), it's really hard to process something like that.

For example, giving Google an unfamilar search term: "fleetsubmissionstarmade"



Will have no results, Google has not got enough data on those terms to be able to tell where one word begins and the other ends. However, if I put an identifier in-between the words...



Way more results!

The same goes for our search, we don't have the power of Google, so combined words in most cases are not going to get many if any results.

Let's try the same with SMD search...



8 pages! 20 results on a page, so that's around 141-160 results (this is just searching in Community Content).

Names should never be grouped together. I do notice that the terms you were searching for had the text without identifiers. I'm not sure why those aren't being picked up on, I tried it with a more complex search engine called Elastic Search (used in ebay, LinkedIn, uber) which I re-enabled today. The same issue occurs. I'll look into this a little more, but you shouldn't really be searching for terms with no identifiers.

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, the advanced search module has been re-enabled. Search results should now be more accurate, by default they are ordered in relevancy with a recency relevance weight. What this means is the forum will display the results that best match the search term plus take into consideration when they were posted, the older a result, the bigger the "weight" and the further down the list it will go.

 

[Croquelune]

DukeofRealms Yep my bad, I picked out the 2 only submissions which had a little typo. I tought it was the Criss's way to name submission rule for the challenge.