Forum search seriously broken

Searching for "friendly" returns no posts since 2005 even though there are many more recent posts on friendly URLS.

If you use "advanced search" you get the same thing unless you explicitly set the Message Age to 0-1100 or less and then you only get posts through 2008. If you set the age even lower, you can get more recent ones.

It appears that the search starts at the beginning of all the posts and stops when it reaches its maximum of 5 pages of posts. Any attempt to find a recent post on a popular topic is doomed unless you use advanced search and set the maximum Message Age fairly low. Worse yet, the information returned with the default search on many topics is seriously out-of-date and would often lead the user to do things that won’t work at all or have been replaced by much simpler methods.

I know you can use Google search, but that often returns too much information.

I think this failure in the forum search is a major cause of the complaints about the MODx documentation.

Is it possible to set the default maximum message age to 100 or 200 (my tests suggest that 300 is too high) and let users set it higher in advanced search if they need to go farther back? That would make the default search infinitely more usable, IMO.

Yeah.. SMF search functionality has always been very bad. I don’t know if we can do much about it though.. unless if there’s some third party search plugin for SMF. I have often tried to find some of my post with certain words in it and narrowed the results with "by user" field, but it does not find the posts, even though search terms are ok. I have just resorted to the "my recent posts" list and tried to find the post manually.

Google search doesn’t help much either and now that it also returns results from fisheye / crusible etc, it very rarely gives good results.

As a summary, I don’t even use the searches any more, because they just do not work. I try to find things manually. And I also think that this is very big drawback for users in MODx community.

Quote from: doze at Mar 20, 2009, 06:15 AM

Google search doesn’t help much either and now that it also returns results from fisheye / crusible etc, it very rarely gives good results.

The Google forum search is working great for me. No results from anywhere but the forum, and I am able to find everything I set out to look for today. Can you give me some examples of specific things that are not being found by the Google forum search available above?

I haven’t used the searches for some time, so I don’t know what exactly would be a good example.. but for example I remember one time that I tried to search a post made by me where I told how to use phpThumb with MaxiGallery and couldn’t find it after trying every search on the planet.. then I just browsed all my posts manually and have been doing that much..

I usually remember who wrote some post that I’m trying to search, but it doesn’t help much with google search when you can’t narrow them by username.. and SMF search sucks at that.

Now that I quickly tried the google search, it might be that I’ve been getting the results from wiki and crusible because I first start the search from the box in forums and then write more specific keywords in the google page but now noticed that the "Search modxcms.com" option box isn’t checked by default.

The problem with the Google search is that you often want to modify your search terms once you see the results and at that point, the "forum search" is no longer an option, so either you get all the fisheye crucible stuff, or you go back to the forum page and start over there.

The google search also turns up a ton of result links that lead to unstyled pages. I’m used to it and know how to fix them, but I’m sure new users find it disturbing.

I’ve not tested it but it should be possible to append the search with "-wap" which would elminate the mobile pages from results (its what I do to get rid of them.)