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The search function in this forum really sucks!
Is there really no way to get a better search function for the forum?
Time and again I search for something and DuckDuckGo never finds it...
E.g. search for "Dark Park"...you'd expect to get the topic https://forum.loopypro.com/discussion/67907/dark-park-by-lewis-le-val-released/p1 as a result, right? Nope, DDG doesn't find it...
How about this one, https://forum.loopypro.com/discussion/67966/a-walk-in-the-dark-park-sonder#latest, with the words "Dark Park" clearly in the thread? Nope...
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, I don't know...
Comments
You're not doing anything wrong. DDG does bloody f-all to help me find what I'm looking for too. 😅 It's clunky and unintuitive.
Iirc, we tried Google in the past, and that didn't work out for whatever reason, can't recall. It worked fine for me, and there is a way to search a site in Google's search bar. I think it was formatted like "site:forum.loopypro.com dark park" (where dark park is the example of what we're searching for). Extra steps though, and I'd like to see Google brought back as the preferred search engine.
Yeah, that's what I usually do when DDG fails...
Exactly. Hopefully @Michael can someday switch it back to Google to make less steps for us who prefer to search with Google. 😅
The problem is not the search function in this forum, it’s the search function on google or bing or whatever. Google as the biggest player doesn’t want you to find results since several years ago, it wants you to find adds. Things that were useful like +required term now get circumvented. We should go back to smoke signals and pigeons
My biggest problem with DDG is that I can never tell anything from the hits it brings up (at least on my iPhone), like how recent the post was or how relevant it actually is to what I’m specifically searching for. So I usually just click on a few until I get too frustrated to continue. I’m not sure the Goog would be any better, because it’s just ads and AI anymore.
I hate that it will ignore specified search parameters. It took it from a real search tool to just pushing products. Now any time I google something I want to read up on I’m shown sponsored ads, the usually inaccurate AI summary, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, suggested alternative searches, and then some written info. They really want you to buy shit, trust AI, and “contribute to the discussion” - aka feed more text into the data bucket.
Searching the internet is dead right now. Even if you pay for it it’s barely acceptable. We’re gonna be stuck here for a while.
Yes, saddening and disgraceful. I'd really like to see class action lawsuits against Google and many other of these companies. The way they just suck all the info out of the internet, depriving sites of ad revenue, and present that info on AI summaries at the top of the page feels wrong to me on every level.
I believe we switched from Google to DDG following the forum name change, as discussed in this thread. So it's complicated.
Relying on third-party search engines is always going to be a cludge, much better to use a built-in system to search the database. Not sure what’s available for Vanilla though.
But DDG uses bing, so we’re being screwed sideways. They all turned evil and there’s no alternative in sight
There are several factors involved, including your main browser, browser settings, extensions, what you search, the actual title of threads/topics, etc…
For a long time i always found what i was searching high in the results, but more recently i noticed it’s been a bit less accurate. Not a big difference, but occasionally things wouldn’t show up as high in the results, or i needed multiple searches to find something. I’m not exactly sure why, but the forum changes could be the issue. Basically what @uncledave and @jwmmakerofmusic said makes sense, and is most likely the reason.
My understanding is that the poor search results is the fruit of Vanilla not having a good search engine.
That's correct. Vanilla doesn't have such a thing and isn't going to get it. The topic has been discussed for years in the Vanilla community. There are scads of community contributed plugins for Vanilla, but none for a comprehensive search engine.
As mentioned earlier, searching with Google and adding site:forum.loopypro.com to the search string is one way to get (slightly) better results.
@lasselu - one contributing factor might be frequency of site indexing. The thread you searched for is pretty recent. It's possible it DDG hasn't scanned the site yet since then.
After reading this I searched for Dark Park and got this first try:
To add some background, a year of few ago, there was an explosion of web crawler activity that was bringing the site to its knees. Michael found a solution but the result is that indexing the forum is laggy.
I'm not sure I fully trust the results, and would never post them verbatim, which I think is a little rude without fact-checking and putting into my own words, but I've had some success putting queries such as:
or
or
Into engines such as chatGPT. It's annoyingly editorial, but can help to find what I'm looking for in a large thread.
At this day and time I’m using gemini. Of all the evils it seems the lesser evil atm
Can’t stand altman anymore than musk
Yeah, I get that as well now...as @wim says, it's probably an indexing issue...
Strange, I would have thought that would be a fairly straightforward task. Years ago I built my own CMS, and included a custom feature that searched specific tables in the MySQL database, and posted them on a results page. And I’m an idiot, so I’m surprised one of the clever people hasn’t come up with something.
Maybe it hammers the website performance a bit too much?
I'm surprised too. But that's what I found as I looked into it. Lots of saying that it really should be done but nothing ever coming of it. Vanilla forums is pretty much what it is at this point.
I ran a Vanilla based forum for about 10 years and all search sucks on Vanilla unfortunately.