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Search Issues

As I've been playing around a bit with search on 2.0 I came up with a few questions, so I figured I ask here in hopes that someone uses the function(s) can provide their observations as well.

First up,  very short topics can get a high relevance and float to the top.  I was going to buffer that effect with a small tweak to not allow a really short topic from getting to much weight.   Basically it is the way Relative search weight for number of matching messages within a topic: is used, but if you have a one reply topic it can basically get the full weight as all the replies do match.

Next, when doing a search with Show results as messages unchecked.  This is basically a topic search, the linked message in the results is the last message in that topic that contains the search term.  Does this make sense? Should it be the first message in that topic that contains the search term (which is often the first message)?  Sure I'd like it to be the one with the most saturation, but I don't really want to rewrite this thing either.

Thoughts?  Happy with the results as they are? seeing some of the behaviors I listed above?

I do have a couple of easy patches that can be tried (on 1.1)
Last Edit: July 27, 2022, 10:52:15 pm by Spuds

Re: Search Issues

Reply #1 –

Quote from: Spuds – Should it be the first message in that topic that contains the search term (which is often the first message)?
Makes more sense than last to me, yes.

Search behavior as such I've never really had an issue with, other than that I've never really understood the view that only shows topic titles.

Re: Search Issues

Reply #2 –

Quote from: Frenzie – other than that I've never really understood the view that only shows topic titles.
If you are referring to the search results page only showing the subject line and no body (for some results), this has been addressed.  That was caused when you were searching (topic based, which is the default) and the topic had enough relevance to appear in the results, but the specific message that was picked only had the term in the subject.

I've implemented the short topic and short message tweaks to help with relevance issues.  Fixed likes weight (if used) as it was not circulated correctly, Fixed not showing any body text for some results. Fixed it not showing results in a compact view. Tweaked the term highlighting when searching on messages. Changed the behavior of linking to the last matched message in a topic to instead be the first match message.

Re: Search Issues

Reply #3 –

I was partially referring to different forum software when I wrote that, partially mistakenly thinking/misremembering Elk did it too. A near-constant annoyance I have when using search on forums is having to go back to check "Show results as messages" or something along those lines because by default it just shows which topic a certain term occurs in.

But Elk doesn't actually suffer from that ailment, unless it did back in Simple Machines (or possibly 1.x). For example vBulletin displays this behavior.

tl;dr Never mind what I wrote, except as a compliment for Elk.