[wp-forums] search results

[Jalenack]

I've noticed this as well. I've found search.wordpress.org almost
useless, because there's no order in the results. It also turns up a
lot of noisy summary that doesn't help the user. I find it very
annoying that trying to search the codex just turns up a lot of forum
posts.

In my (owen's too!) Codex/Forum search plugin (
http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/codex-search-plugin/ ), we separated
the results by the source they came from, and also just str_replace()d
a lot of the noise words. It REALLY helps the readability of the
results. I think a lot could be lifted from that plugin alone.

By the way, we're using the Yahoo API I believe, which seems to be
pretty good. I think search.wordpress.org uses it too.

On 8/31/05, TechGnome <tg at tannagh.com> wrote:
> I've thought the same thing.... but....
> And someone correct me if I have it wrong, but I think this is because
> it uses the Google API to do the search. Google simply returns the
> results (presumably via XML) and the search result page simply renders
> what comes back. Which is why you get the "Support Forums. Search First.
> Register or Login: Username: Password: etc." at the begining of each
> forum result. It's what Google sees. Personaly I'd like to see it laid
> out a little differently too, but it isn't easy to build a good search
> engine for a site (especialy when there's different places to search -
> Forums vs Codex) that returns relevant results. Google already can do
> that, and it's easier to hook up.
> 
> -tg
> 
> Scott Merrill wrote:
> > This may be completely out of anyone's control, but it just occured to
> > me that the contents of search results are pretty crappy.  Consider a
> > search for "enable sending referrers".  The results look like this:
> >
> > Support Forums. Search First. Register or login: Username: Password:
> > enable sending referrers? Topic started 9 months ago. 9 posts so far.
> > Latest reply from btwendel. This topic is not resolved. Hello, ...
> > "Sorry, you need to enable sending referrers, for this feature to work."
> > ... followed the instructions at
> > http://codex.wordpress.org/Enable_Sending_Referrers. and it works now ...
> >
> > Support Forums. Search First. Register or login: Username: Password: How
> > do i enable sending of referrers? Topic started 4 months ago. 19 posts
> > so far. Latest reply from pt49. This topic is not resolved ... delete
> > blog entries etc, keep getting the 'enable sending of referrers'
> > message. Using Microsoft Explorer ...
> > http://codex.wordpress.org/Enable_Sending_Referrers. Posted: 2005-04-02
> > 11 ...
> >
> > There's a lot of text there that has nothing to do with the search
> > query.  Sure, folks who are likely subscribed to this list will say "But
> > it shows whether the topic is resolved, to the person searching can zoom
> > in on only closed threads!"
> >
> > To that I say hogwash.  There's nothing to differentiate one result from
> > the next for the average user.
> >
> > Is there anything we can do to improve the search results to help people
> > who actually do search?
> >
> _______________________________________________
> wp-forums mailing list
> wp-forums at lists.automattic.com
> http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/wp-forums
> 


-- 
Andrew Sutherland
Jalenack.com