Forum search & Google search

Hi,

Is this mod installed to our SMF? SMF Search Enhancement Mod

Don’t know that will it help anything, but the current SMF search that we have sucks alot.. If I try to search for example some of my posts (limiting the query by username) and I enter keyword(s) that I know for sure that I have posted, it rarely finds anything.

The Google search box that we have in the top of the forums is not usable anymore, because it has indexed all from modxcms.com, including wiki, crucible / fisheye, flyspray, resource repository... etc. It has become hard to find topics from forums using that. There should be own google site searches for just single area, like forum and another one for resource repository..

Most of the posts in MaxiGallery subforums for example are issues that are already discussed in some other thread in there, and sometimes users admit right at the beginning that they know there’s an answer somewhere in there, but haven’t been able to find it. Some just don’t even try to find, because the current search tools suck.

And alot of people don’t know that you can use "site:modxcms.com/forums <keywords>" in google. It would be good that if we had radio buttons besides the Google search box at the top for just forums search and repository search and.. or a dropdown list to choose from.

The Google search is good, but there’s still lot’s of situations where SMF search is needed, main ones being when you try to search a post from certain user and/or limit search to some specific board. That’s why it’s important to also have the SMF search as good as possible.

EDIT: also if the SMF error logs are filling up with "8: Undefined index: brd", you might want to look at this: SMF 1.1.4 Search "brd" Bug Fix

+1 I totally agree with you and this addon seems to be very interresting, searching a specific board, an author... very nice !

Also this could cut down support request !

The advanced search in our board seems to have most of the options already (except topic id and match mode), but there are some additions to quick search too in this mod.

And if the features of the MOD are valid, it could offer some help to our situation in the form of better search results:

1. Significant reduction of missing results (now very rare)
2. Less noise and therefore reasonably better relevance
3. Hugely improved ranking algorithm (when using FullText index)
4. Enhanced phrase search
5. Intelligent handling for ’(apostrophe), .(period), and –(dash)
6. Supports short keywords (3 characters or less)
7. Supports stopwords (clichés)
8. Active board ranking heuristic (based on mouser’s suggestion)
9. Expand/foldable result summary
10. Viewing all matching posts in a topic with one click
11. Ability to sort search results live
12. Quick dropdown search box

There’s a couple of updates that need to be applied to the board. Please don’t forget to let me revisit this next week upon my return. Search sounds like a great idea indeed!