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New Search Engine
- Thread starter arn
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I found this to be a new problem too.
I used to be able to easily find posts where I (or another specified user) had been quoted simply by searching. I can no longer do this with the new search engine
Your 10 minutes are up.
Hi,
I emailed the fix to arn, is up to him now when he will upload the files.
I'm the developer who created the search product for vBulletin.
Let me know if the new search criteria works properly now.
Edit: Please note that the search criteria bases its date line on the initial thread date (otherwise first post made into thread), if you search in titles only. So, if you search for "battery", it will look into titles for threads started since Yesterday or more recent.
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I found this to be a new problem too.
I used to be able to easily find posts where I (or another specified user) had been quoted simply by searching. I can no longer do this with the new search engine
Quotes are ignored, in order to save disk space into indexes. I understand your logic behind this but is just redundant information that will not change. If you want to see if someone quoted you, simply subscribe to a thread and follow the replies or ask arn to install a quote notification system that alerts you on that event.
Even if you will be able to search into quotes for your name, you will not find all results anyways since the search works like Google Search. It puts weight on most found keywords, than it picks most relevant 1000 threads and orders them by date.
Yes, it appears to be working now. Yes, I'm aware that when searching by thread, the time criteria returns results based on the date of the thread (1st post). If searching by post, the results are based on the date of the post. I use the thread search to find new threads that were started in the past day/week that dealt with a particular topic.
I found this to be a new problem too.
I used to be able to easily find posts where I (or another specified user) had been quoted simply by searching. I can no longer do this with the new search engine
I could not even find that you replied this. This new search engine sucks. Still broken.
To replicate please go to the search drop-down menu or advanced search screen. Enter a user name (like my own: "BC2009") and search for "Posts". This should return all posts that contain my user name (typically replies to my comments or people insulting me or in rare rare cases complimenting me). Anyway, it shows only 39 results. I know that the results were previously in the hundreds.
What gives?
UPDATE: The problem appears to be when the user name only appears as the first part of the post within the bracketed "QUOTE" tag. At least that is what I am seeing. Posts like this that include a user name outside the quotes are getting found as well as those that begin with the "Wirelessly posted...." stuff. Sure would be nice if somebody from MR replied to this. Thanks.
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Lame. The worst thing any developer on my team can tell me is "we are not giving the user what makes sense because for some technical reason it does not fit with how we implemented things". Saving disk space does not seem to be a valid reason for removing such a valid use case. I must admit that i prefer the system that The Verge uses that lets me see all my posts and which have replies, but that system connects each reply with the original post with more than just contained text in a block quote. Not sure if the MR forums do this.
... looking into this.
arn
It would be best if it hung off your "profile" like on The Verge. A list of all your posts and with each post an indication of the number of replies (and preferably a link to each reply).
But I don't want to have to subscribe to every single thread I post in to be able to see if I have been quoted (i.e. if another user has responded directly to something I have said). I will end up subscribed to far too many threads, I never had to do this before and therefore this to me is a step backward in functionality.
Please fix!
What the developers are trying to tell you is that you cannot have everything you want in life. On top of that, you are not even open to listen or understand what is the proposed solution. FAIL
The current search behavior will not be changed. The proper way is NOT to search for keywords on text that should not be searchable to begin with (redundant quote text, already present into database) but rather be alerted if someone quoted you in a thread so you can directly view that quote and not be forced to search for it.
OK, here's another wrinkle. If I search for threads started by a person, it doesn't show all the threads. Whether I use the "Find all threads started by xxx" link in the profile, or whether I use Advanced Search to "Find Threads Started by User" with a date range of "Any Date", it doesn't produce accurate results. For example, when I search for my own threads that I've started, it only shows 2. While I don't start many new threads, I know I've started much more than that over time.
FAIL? Seriously, let's bring this back to a constructive discussion.... I think you missed my point. It worked before, and now it does not work and there is no alternative in place. So "you can't have everything you want in life" actually translates into "you can't have what you had before because we forgot to think of this use case" The #1 wrong answer to any valid customer use case has got to be:
- "you cannot have everything you want in life"
The #2 one is:
- "we cannot do it because our implementation did not consider that use case and now it is too hard"
Regarding, alternative solutions -- I am all for that -- you would be a hero if you could implement it quickly. But this new search feature went live before the new alternatives were in place. I am guessing the MR forum does not actually store links to original posts that were quoted. More likely it is implemented as a linked list of database records containing the comment text and a thread ID, and within the comment text is the quoted segments from the original poster including a link back to the original post (i.e.: it is unstructured data).
If that is case, then the only way to implement it is to recognize the links back to original posts via pattern matching, extract those links and maintain a reference table of "quoted posts" for each posts. From that the reverse-lookup can also be done. So the table would contain:
thread_id, poster_user_id, post_id, reply_to_user_id, reply_to_post_id
If you had this table you could lookup all posts by a given user, all posts in reply to a given a user, all posts in reply to a specific post. The construction and population of this table requires some unstructured text analysis on the existing database, but its not outside the realm of the same code being used to exclude the quoted blocks in the first place. Essentially, exclusion of quoted blocks is just pattern matching and ignoring what is being matched. Instead you'd be looking for pattern matching and then analysis of the block for links to other posts.
It would be incredibly cool if this site offered the new search functionality along side new functionality to click on your user name and bring up all your comments with reverse links back to everybody who quotes your comment with a link back (The Verge does something close to this). However, this was not the case. Instead the new functionality went live BEFORE the alternative was even coded (or possibly even considered).
You would be a hero if you could pull off this new functionality in a week. But until this feature is up users are crippled in their ability to monitor responses to their posts. Very few of us with real jobs can sit around all day and follow an entire thread as it develops. To summarize the requirements:
1) Need ability to find all posts made by a user (including myself)
2) Need ability to find all posts made in reply to a user (including myself)
3) Need ability to find all replies to a specific post.
4) Need all of the above without annoying messages being sent to my email to "alert me" -- this needs to be Web-based functionality that is produced on demand.
I know I am not the only user who wants this. Keep us posted on progress.
PS: I get that you worked hard on this new search engine and sucks to have people disregarding the improvements and focusing on the deficiencies. Perhaps I was a little overly critical, but I feel you have overly minimized the use case that is being brought up here. This is how it goes in software development when you release something that takes away support for valid use cases. Randy Ubillos with Apple is probably dealing with much of the same feelings over Final Cut Pro X right now -- for a guy like me it FCPX looks great because I was not a previous user who lost functionality. However, to those who leveraged something that is now gone it is extremely frustrating. My MacRumors participation experience has been seriously degraded since I cannot see how others replied to me or to others users whose posts I find interesting. Your "alerting solution" is not desirable because it likely would not let me be alerted when other users get responded to and also because I don't want an email alert -- I want a listing of all activity I am interested in. Previously the "search" feature served as a proxy for that. The proxy is now gone and MR just became far less usable for me and for others. Still easy to read the articles -- not so easy to participate in the discussions without wading through everything.
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Thanks for the report, I will look into it and let you know.
Edit: The results look accurate to me, on my development server. Can you start a new thread, wait 10min and display new threads started by you? It will display your newly started thread.
Let me adopt your type of reply: Lame. The worst thing any customer can tell me is that they know in advance how a new product will work, without understanding the logic behind it or read a detailed product description. How can you assume these things if you did not saw or read anything about the product? DOUBLE FAIL
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Well I'm quite happy with the new search. Now when I perform an advanced search by user name it displays the results in the date order of the last post a thread has received. Rather than by the last post the username I searched for posted.
I just use this search method to quickly see what threads I have posted in have had any recent activity.
Sometimes a thread may not have activity for months. If it was a technical thread. There could be a question or update that would be good to know.
I long missed this feature and am quite glad it has returned.
I just use this search method to quickly see what threads I have posted in have had any recent activity.
Sometimes a thread may not have activity for months. If it was a technical thread. There could be a question or update that would be good to know.
I long missed this feature and am quite glad it has returned.
You could also bookmark these links:
All your posts | All threads started by you
The easiest way to see these stats for any user is by visiting his/her profile and click on Statistics tab.
