What do you think of the search?

Hi – I’d like opinions on the new search facilities.

 

In general, I think they are improved and a little more useable, but that’s not saying a lot…

 

Hopefully on the plus side –

* can you manage to find the content you want more easily? For instance, if the search finds a relevant comment, at least it now shows you the entire topic.

* Have you found/tried/succeeded with the advanced search facility?

* Have you found/tried/succeeded with the tag cloud?

* Have you found/tried/succeeded with the member search?

* Have you found/tried/succeeded with the resource search?

 

On the negative side –

* it’s disappointing that the searches for most content, members, tags and resources are all accessed in different places. Are they obvious enough that people can find them? Are there enough links between them so you can move from one to another?

* the resources search will only really start being useful when we a “mass tagging campaing” underway. I think we’ll let this bed in a little before starting that.

* unfortunately, some options for resources were introduced that I had not requested. Does the interface for adding a resource make enough sense or does it need simplifying?

 

Thanks for any feedback.

I’ve found certain users don’t show up in the search, e.g. our prolific Mark Crookes. Searching his first name or second name in the main search box doesn’t return a link to his user profile, however using Members / search members does find him. Weird! I haven’t found any other example yet.

I’ve found a problem (minor but irritating) with search. It doesn’t find numbers.

I have discoverd that if I have opened asome  of the notifications on my BlackBerry (which I do frequently) that the hperlink is not a link when I open the post on a pc.  (Hope that makes sense.)  I’ve tried pasting the URL  – that doesn’t seem to work.  I’ve tried searching on some of the numbers in the notification.  That doesn’t work either.  So the long way is to search  for the person. This happened today with Bendan’s post but not David Cameron’s.

Also for some posts there seem to be two notifications.  One just an update and the other to do with with the new content. Happened with David’s just now.

Ruth

Thank you, but I don’t quite follow this. Can you take me through it step-by-step?

 

Is it that you read the email on your BlackBerry, and later read the email in Outlook on a PC, but now the hyperlink to the post

(e.g. https://www.talkphysics.org/groups/2571/forums/3398#comment-8030 ) just shows as plain text, not a hyperlink?

 

And is the failure to search for numbers part of the same problem (e.g. searching for topic comment “8030” in my example hyperlink https://www.talkphysics.org/groups/2571/forums/3398#comment-8030 ), or something separate (e.g. searching for a number that was mentioned inside a post)?

Hmm, we’ve established that the search does not look at hypertext – that’s a problem. E.g. knowing that someone provided a link to cleapss.org.uk, we’d have no way to find it. Search needs to be extended to cover hyperlinks, HTML tags, etc.

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