UKBouldering.com

Experimental feature upgrade - search engine based forum search. (Read 3534 times)

Bubba

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As most long term forum users are aware, the built in forum search functionality has been next to useless. 

About the only thing that it had going for it was that it was context sensitive depending upon where you were inside the forum. This would have been useful if it actually returned any meaningful results...which it didn't.  If you really wanted to find something most of us would go to a search engine and use site:ukbouldering.com etc

The other problem with the built-in search is that every time somebody searched for a new word or phrase, it added that search to a database table which has now got 17 million records in it. It goes without saying that this is a performance hog.

So, as an experiment I've updated the search box at the top right of the page so that you can use one of three major search engines to search for results from the site instead of the built-in system.  No real need to explain, but just put in your keyword, select your search-engine and click the button.

I suspect that once you start to use it you'll find it far more useful than the old system, but as this is currently only experimental, it's not certain yet whether this will be kept permanently.

If you're crazy enough that you'd actually rather use the built-in forum search, you can still get to it from the "forum" menu under where your avatar is :)
« Last Edit: February 10, 2013, 11:26:36 am by Bubba, Reason: clarity »

dave

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How about the search via tapatalk, what does that use?

Bubba

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That would use the built-in search.  Just checking then was the first time I've ever used it, do people use it a lot?

The built-in search would never be disabled completely, but the search index could be dispensed with or cut down drastically if the majority of search was done via the search engines.

Another thing to consider is searching PMs - again, the built in search would be useful here if it actually did a decent job. The last time I really needed to find something in an old PM it was useless and I just had to search through them all anyway.

Bubba

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This has been slightly tweaked.

The Google search was returning a lot of mobile-optimised links so I've added search operators to discard wap/wap2/imode results.

Easy enough to tailor by adding or removing the appropriate "inurl" operator if you have need to do so.

Drew

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I must admit I really liked the fact that it would only search the sub-forum where I was currently looking (i.e. searching for Northumberland under "UK and Eire" would be the best way to search for accomodation in Northumberland, rather than just new problems etc etc). Is it a lot of effort to include a "Search this sub-forum/search the whole site" option? I don't know if Google etc can manage that. I've certainly not been able to when I've tried e.g. site:http://ukbouldering.com/board/index.php/board,23.0.html

Bubba

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The way the board is set up means that the context-sensitive search isn't possible using Google (as you've already found out).

I think the loss of that functionality is the only downside to using external search. I guess it's a trade-off between having better searches most of the time but losing the occasional context-sensitive search. Well, that's how I used it anyway, did anyone use the C.S. search the majority of the time?

 

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