Geeklog Forums

I just upgraded to 1.6 from 1.4, and (despite the huge amount of effort that I know went into it), I must say I'm very disappointed by the new search engine. For my site, the fact that all results (stories, comments, links, etc.) are mashed together is not a benefit in the least -- the stories themselves need to be the focal point for searching, as that's where the answer the user is looking for is most likely to be found. I've dug through all the config options, but I don't see any way to separate the results as they used to be. Is this possible in any way? As it stands now, search on my site is next to useless. Can't we at least get a "by type" option added to the sort pop-up? I also don't want the static pages, links, or anything other than hints or comments searched. How can I disable these searches? Do I have to (gads, I hate doing this) modify the core Geeklog files to accomplish that? If so, that seems like a huge oversight to me -- as the site admin, I should have easy control over which data types are searched and which are not searched. Also, the way the results are coming up on the site is just strange. If you run this search, you'll see that the descriptions are all incredibly short -- just ...Finder.... Why don't I get the longer descriptions as they come up on Geeklog.net? Finally, barring good answers to any of the above, how much trouble would I cause by reverting the search class and related files to the version that shipped with 1.4? Will that work? Sorry for the negative tone, but this is a huge disappointment, and something my users are not very happy about at the moment. -rob.

Sorry to hear you don't like the new search.

Not sure why you wouldn't want to be able to search through Links, etc. Hiding Static Pages from the search will probably come in 1.6.1. But it hadn't occurred to me that someone would want to hide other stuff as well (especially since we've always search through everything). You could simply comment out the search functions in those plugins' functions.inc, of course.

I don't see the search results that only display "Finder" - looks like you switched to tabular result display now. Can you send me the exact content of the stories or comments that show that behavior? We had a few such cases during the beta phase for 1.6.0 but I thought we fixed them all.

bye, Dirk

In the old search, we searched everything, but the display separated the results by category, and lead with stories. Typically, if someone's searching hints, they're searching for a hint; comments are used to enhance hints at times, but they won't typically contain all of the content of the hint itself.

For instance, a hint may have a long script, and someone may post a comment that says "here's a better way to do part XYZ of that script." If you search and the comment comes up first, you won't have any context on what the code is for. Also, many users search because they know they remember seeing a hint on some specific thing, and they just want to get that hint back on their screen.

With the new inter-jumbled results, it's a crap shoot as to what comes out on top. What I'm really looking for, I guess, is more admin control over search. For hints, the best search strategy is: search hints and comments only, separate the results by category type, order by date newest to oldest. Unless I'm wrong, getting that is going to take a rewrite of the search engine, right?

-rob.