Is the Search function broken?

roundthebend

When doing searches recently I've not been getting results displayed. But the thingy says there are XX results found in 0.00X seconds. And, just now, I even got page links but none of them.....

Scratch that. The results are there but there's a huge chunk of whitespace between the search bar and the actual links. Curious. Like, so much whitespace the links are all off the bottom of my screen.

rze99

It's so bad I never use it.

Always use Google "the thing I want to find" then site:www.thefretboard.co.uk ordered by date

digitalscream

roundthebend said:

When doing searches recently I've not been getting results displayed. But the thingy says there are XX results found in 0.00X seconds. And, just now, I even got page links but none of them.....

Scratch that. The results are there but there's a huge chunk of whitespace between the search bar and the actual links. Curious. Like, so much whitespace the links are all off the bottom of my screen.

Yes, it's annoying the snot out of me and I can't figure out exactly what the problem is. As soon as I do, I'll fix it!

rze99 said:

It's so bad I never use it.

Always use Google "the thing I want to find" then site:www.thefretboard.co.uk ordered by date

...then you may have missed the updates from a couple of years ago. I fixed all Vanilla's broken search indexes and added the advanced search stuff. It's rock-solid reliable now, albeit sometimes up to five minutes out of date.

Contrast that with Google's index (which is up to a week out of date), as well as the fact that there's a lot of stuff you can do with it that's simply impossible with Google - user searches, multi-category searches (very handy when searching the Classifieds, for example), thread-title-only etc.

rze99

digitalscream said:

roundthebend said:

When doing searches recently I've not been getting results displayed. But the thingy says there are XX results found in 0.00X seconds. And, just now, I even got page links but none of them.....

Scratch that. The results are there but there's a huge chunk of whitespace between the search bar and the actual links. Curious. Like, so much whitespace the links are all off the bottom of my screen.

Yes, it's annoying the snot out of me and I can't figure out exactly what the problem is. As soon as I do, I'll fix it!

rze99 said:

It's so bad I never use it.

Always use Google "the thing I want to find" then site:www.thefretboard.co.uk ordered by date

...then you may have missed the updates from a couple of years ago. I fixed all Vanilla's broken search indexes and added the advanced search stuff. It's rock-solid reliable now, albeit sometimes up to five minutes out of date.

Contrast that with Google's index (which is up to a week out of date), as well as the fact that there's a lot of stuff you can do with it that's simply impossible with Google - user searches, multi-category searches (very handy when searching the Classifieds, for example), thread-title-only etc.

Then I’ll give it a whirl 

digitalscream

@roundthebend ;- OK, so you nudged me into trying something else. Fixed!

Sporky

The not-very-new-any-more search stuff works really well. Odd syntax, but jolly effective. 

pt22

digitalscream said:

roundthebend said:

When doing searches recently I've not been getting results displayed. But the thingy says there are XX results found in 0.00X seconds. And, just now, I even got page links but none of them.....

Scratch that. The results are there but there's a huge chunk of whitespace between the search bar and the actual links. Curious. Like, so much whitespace the links are all off the bottom of my screen.

Yes, it's annoying the snot out of me and I can't figure out exactly what the problem is. As soon as I do, I'll fix it!

rze99 said:

It's so bad I never use it.

Always use Google "the thing I want to find" then site:www.thefretboard.co.uk ordered by date

...then you may have missed the updates from a couple of years ago. I fixed all Vanilla's broken search indexes and added the advanced search stuff. It's rock-solid reliable now, albeit sometimes up to five minutes out of date.

Contrast that with Google's index (which is up to a week out of date), as well as the fact that there's a lot of stuff you can do with it that's simply impossible with Google - user searches, multi-category searches (very handy when searching the Classifieds, for example), thread-title-only etc.

Searching (at least via mobile) isn’t great if you want to sort results by “most recent”. 

So if you just search, it does a decent job of pulling results based on the string. When you then choose a sort by most recent and re-search the search string is not treated the same, and Boolean search modifiers do not work to maintain the structure to return relevant results. 

For instance, search “Carr Mercury V” (without the quotes) on mobile. Works great. Refine the search to £amps. Still great. Then try to sort the results by most recent and the search looses all grip on reality and starts returning results for the letter v in YouTube links in posts. Even if you try surrounding the string with quotes or added “+” it doesn’t impact the search results. 

digitalscream

pt22 said:

Searching (at least via mobile) isn’t great if you want to sort results by “most recent”. 

So if you just search, it does a decent job of pulling results based on the string. When you then choose a sort by most recent and re-search the search string is not treated the same, and Boolean search modifiers do not work to maintain the structure to return relevant results. 

For instance, search “Carr Mercury V” (without the quotes) on mobile. Works great. Refine the search to £amps. Still great. Then try to sort the results by most recent and the search looses all grip on reality and starts returning results for the letter v in YouTube links in posts. Even if you try surrounding the string with quotes or added “+” it doesn’t impact the search results. 

Interesting. It's supposed to be identical to the desktop search, but it appears to be using an entirely different form and setup. I'll look into it if I get time.

Meanwhile, doing what you've described here is somewhat redundant on desktop - all search results are in reverse date order by default.

pt22

digitalscream said:

Meanwhile, doing what you've described here is somewhat redundant on desktop - all search results are in reverse date order by default.

But I make all my bad decisions browsing £ forums while in bed on my phone!!

Cheers for looking into this when you can. 

topdog91

pt22 said:

digitalscream said:

Meanwhile, doing what you've described here is somewhat redundant on desktop - all search results are in reverse date order by default.

But I make all my bad decisions browsing £ forums while in bed on my phone!!

Cheers for looking into this when you can. 

Feeling somewhat validated!

Emp_Fab

Edit: Ignore this...  I was trying it on my mobile and the search is broken on mobile, so I selected Desktop Mode on my phone browser and it gives you a weird version of the search that is definitely broken.... but trying it now on my PC and it works OK.


@digitalscream I've been trying to follow Jonathangus's guide in the Help section but it looks different to what we have now, so I'm presuming your tweaking did that...  But for the life of me I cannot get "@user" to work.  Trying to find posts containing a particular word from a specific user just doesn't work at all for me.

pt22

digitalscream said:

pt22 said:

Searching (at least via mobile) isn’t great if you want to sort results by “most recent”. 

So if you just search, it does a decent job of pulling results based on the string. When you then choose a sort by most recent and re-search the search string is not treated the same, and Boolean search modifiers do not work to maintain the structure to return relevant results. 

For instance, search “Carr Mercury V” (without the quotes) on mobile. Works great. Refine the search to £amps. Still great. Then try to sort the results by most recent and the search looses all grip on reality and starts returning results for the letter v in YouTube links in posts. Even if you try surrounding the string with quotes or added “+” it doesn’t impact the search results. 

Interesting. It's supposed to be identical to the desktop search, but it appears to be using an entirely different form and setup. I'll look into it if I get time.

Meanwhile, doing what you've described here is somewhat redundant on desktop - all search results are in reverse date order by default.

Just bumping this as I searched for some info on the Bondi Sick As overdrive as I’ll be spending Xmas down under. When sorting by recent I get any post with the word “as” in it. 

Cheers. 

Sporky

If you put quote marks around it you don't get hits for just "as". Well, I didn't when I just tried it. 

digitalscream

pt22 said:

digitalscream said:

pt22 said:

Searching (at least via mobile) isn’t great if you want to sort results by “most recent”. 

So if you just search, it does a decent job of pulling results based on the string. When you then choose a sort by most recent and re-search the search string is not treated the same, and Boolean search modifiers do not work to maintain the structure to return relevant results. 

For instance, search “Carr Mercury V” (without the quotes) on mobile. Works great. Refine the search to £amps. Still great. Then try to sort the results by most recent and the search looses all grip on reality and starts returning results for the letter v in YouTube links in posts. Even if you try surrounding the string with quotes or added “+” it doesn’t impact the search results. 

Interesting. It's supposed to be identical to the desktop search, but it appears to be using an entirely different form and setup. I'll look into it if I get time.

Meanwhile, doing what you've described here is somewhat redundant on desktop - all search results are in reverse date order by default.

Just bumping this as I searched for some info on the Bondi Sick As overdrive as I’ll be spending Xmas down under. When sorting by recent I get any post with the word “as” in it. 

Cheers. 

To be honest...we're maybe a couple of months from the new software being ready to go live. At this point, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a weekend trying to force Vanilla into behaving sensibly when (for example) I can build the entirety of the search functionality for the new site in that time.

pt22

Sporky said:

If you put quote marks around it you don't get hits for just "as". Well, I didn't when I just tried it. 

On mobile?

pt22

digitalscream said:

pt22 said:

digitalscream said:

pt22 said:

Searching (at least via mobile) isn’t great if you want to sort results by “most recent”. 

So if you just search, it does a decent job of pulling results based on the string. When you then choose a sort by most recent and re-search the search string is not treated the same, and Boolean search modifiers do not work to maintain the structure to return relevant results. 

For instance, search “Carr Mercury V” (without the quotes) on mobile. Works great. Refine the search to £amps. Still great. Then try to sort the results by most recent and the search looses all grip on reality and starts returning results for the letter v in YouTube links in posts. Even if you try surrounding the string with quotes or added “+” it doesn’t impact the search results. 

Interesting. It's supposed to be identical to the desktop search, but it appears to be using an entirely different form and setup. I'll look into it if I get time.

Meanwhile, doing what you've described here is somewhat redundant on desktop - all search results are in reverse date order by default.

Just bumping this as I searched for some info on the Bondi Sick As overdrive as I’ll be spending Xmas down under. When sorting by recent I get any post with the word “as” in it. 

Cheers. 

To be honest...we're maybe a couple of months from the new software being ready to go live. At this point, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a weekend trying to force Vanilla into behaving sensibly when (for example) I can build the entirety of the search functionality for the new site in that time.

Makes sense. Good to know some sort of fix isn’t too far out. Cheers. 

Sporky

pt22 said:

Sporky said:

If you put quote marks around it you don't get hits for just "as". Well, I didn't when I just tried it. 

On mobile?

Brave on an Samsung Galaxy Tab. Same result with Brave on a Pixel 7.

digitalscream

pt22 said:

digitalscream said:

To be honest...we're maybe a couple of months from the new software being ready to go live. At this point, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a weekend trying to force Vanilla into behaving sensibly when (for example) I can build the entirety of the search functionality for the new site in that time.

Makes sense. Good to know some sort of fix isn’t too far out. Cheers. 

For what it's worth...unlike Vanilla, in the new software there's no distinction between desktop and mobile functionality, just a single responsive layout. So...at the very least, if mobile users have a problem then they can rest easy knowing that their frustration will be shared by desktop users too