Forum Search Function: Can It Be Improved?

[Yurgon]

I basically love the current forum. It's fast, good looking, has useful features, and besides insisting on sending users to a 3rd party software on mobile, it's also fairly mobile friendly once that insistence has been actively denied.

But am I the only one to find the search function to be really bad?

I just searched for an old post of mine: "Tutorial: Introduction to Lua scripting". Using that as a search term doesn't even show me the only thread on the entire forum with this exact title on page 1 of the search results.

If there's an obscure or hidden option on the forum backend to make search results more relevant, I would very much appreciate its activation.

As it stands now, forum users will have a very hard time finding what they're looking for, even when using the best possible search terms and refining the search. The results are just very irrelevant, and I find using Google to search for the exact same terms, prefixed with "dcs", tends to get me pointed exactly at the one, two or maybe three relevant threads and/or posts in this very forum.

The search function on the old forum was much better than what we have now and showed much more relevant results.

If we could get a better search function, that might also lead to fewer questions that have been answered many times already, because users who do use the search function will then get more relevant results.

Edited November 21, 2023 by Yurgon

[draconus]

On 11/22/2023 at 12:48 AM, Yurgon said:

I just searched for an old post of mine: "Tutorial: Introduction to Lua scripting". Using that as a search term doesn't even show me the only thread on the entire forum with this exact title on page 1 of the search results.

https://forum.dcs.world/search/?&q="Tutorial%3A Introduction to Lua scripting"&quick=1&search_and_or=or&search_in=titles&sortby=relevancy

Go into advanced search, select "More search options", set "Content titles only", search for "Tutorial: Introduction to Lua scripting" with the quotation marks -> 1 result: your thread.

On 11/22/2023 at 12:48 AM, Yurgon said:

The search function on the old forum was much better than what we have now and showed much more relevant results.

Yes, you're right. In the new forum I just stopped using the embedded search engine and I also use web search instead.

[Yurgon]

7 hours ago, draconus said:

Go into advanced search [...]

Yes, it's possible to refine a search, especially when you know exactly what you're looking for.

But seriously, using an exact thread title as search term should put threads with that exact title on top of the search results without any need to tweak or tinker with the results.

Even enclosing the search term with " quotes doesn't put the thread in question to the top of the search results.

And now imagine users who don't know exactly what they're looking for; maybe they have a general question or even a specific one. They use a combination of search terms and search parameters, but each time they get literally 1000 results, none of which look particularly relevant - and now they're basically required to ask a new question, even though it may have been asked and answered numerous times already.

In its current form, the forum search is almost useless.

[MAXsenna]

I agree! Whenever I look for something, I use Google and "DCS..."

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[Flappie]

On 11/22/2023 at 12:48 AM, Yurgon said:

But am I the only one to find the search function to be really bad?

I believe it wasn't so bad before. It seems some sections of the forum have a messed up search engine configuration.

See:

 

[Yurgon]

Here's another example. I'm currently looking for posts that refer to multicrew aircraft with the control priority setting "equally responsible".

Even with the search term

Quote

"equally AND responsible"

(including the quotes!) some kind of wildcard seems to get applied, and the results contain a pretty wild mix of "equals" and "equally" as well as "response", "responses" and "responsive", however the term "responsible" isn't included once in the results (currently for me 3 results in total).

The search term

Quote

equally responsible

will display just about anything (40 pages of results), with broad variations on the search term, to include the likes of no equal* at all, "equal", "equally", "equals", and then also wild variations of no respons* at all, "response", "responsive", "responsible".

Finally, while the search term

Quote

"equally responsible"

(with quotes, but no "AND") seems to yield the best results, the results still include the likes of "responsability" (!) and "responsibility".

Searching for a DCS-specific phrase by default yields entirely useless results, and only through tweaking the search term do I get results that at least get close to what I'm looking for.

For new, inexperienced or not tech-savvie users, the forum's search function is still pretty much useless because a few good results will get buried in pages and pages of totally non-related results.