The connect forums are a great innovation and a huge step in the right direction.
However in my opinion, the connect search platform is not up to the job. It is frustrated trying to use the connect forums to find meaningful results.
There are a few major flaws as I see it and other might like to add to this list:
No “Advanced Search”. I cannot do a search for “All Words” or “Any Words” so the search result sets are often completely unrelated to my search just because it contained a word.
Search results are far too verbose. I don’t want the result to consume 5 pages of browser space to give me 10 matching searches. Just give me the discussion title and the relevant 2-3 lines of text within the discussion for some context.
Just show the discussion once in the results. When I click on that discussion, I can review the entire thread, but I don’t want 5 out of 10 results showing the same discussion.
Search results should be “paged”. I don’t like this idea of “more results”, like it is up to the search engine to determine how much I handle handle at 1 time. Give me the top 10 results, followed by the total number of pages which I can click through at my discretion just like every other search engine. Also, give me an option to choose how many results to show on 1 page, like 10, 20, 50, 100 or All. (Ties in with the verbosity issue above).
Again just my opinion, any feedback would be appreciated.
I agree with your post. Problem is that we didn’t write this ourselves, adding this will be tricky, unless vanilla starts supporting this out of the box.
@Rick. Good points! Advanced searching is a must, especially as the board’s content increases.
Having tried to do some searching today, I would also like it if there was a way to limit the search to a particular category (RemObjects SDK, Oxygene, etc). Returning results from the entire database of content is just too much, and is often near useless.
I’ve already commented on this before, but can’t help but need to vent my frustration with the near useless search feature. Returning results based on every possible piece of user-entered text within the entire “RemObjects Connect” forum system just sucks.
Today I was looking for some information on ZeroConf (the wiki being another near useless source of documentation), and the top hit was a partial match on a dll name contained within the output listing of an Oxygen compilation attempt for mono on Linux. Really? That’s the top hit?
The search feature needs options to filter by category, post title, post body, and perhaps even author. It could also use rank/sort ability on relevance and date.
Maybe I can find what I need using CodeNewsFast to search the old RO forums.
@Rick. Good points! Advanced searching is a must, especially as the board's content increases.
Having tried to do some searching today, I would also like it if there was a way to limit the search to a particular category (RemObjects SDK, Oxygene, etc). Returning results from the entire database of content is just too much, and is often near useless.