Forum search relevance?

[HiredGoon]

When using the search box at the top of the pages to search within the forum, what relevance is placed on the results?

At times it seems hard to figure out. Are they sorted by your search term in the title or the body, or both? And if so, by date/time of the posting?

Say I am searching for a particular thread that I saw 3 days ago and I remember a unique word in a post, will the search have that post near the top of the results because it was fairly recent?

It usually doesn't work this way, at least for me.

[danp]

When using the search box at the top of the pages to search within the forum, what relevance is placed on the results?

At times it seems hard to figure out. Are they sorted by your search term in the title or the body, or both? And if so, by date/time of the posting?

Say I am searching for a particular thread that I saw 3 days ago and I remember a unique word in a post, will the search have that post near the top of the results because it was fairly recent?

It usually doesn't work this way, at least for me.

It's google's algorithm, all I do is hit their search APIs and spit back the results the way Google finds them most relevant. They seem to be pretty successful in that market so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt

[Philbert]

Google are the masters, but I'm not sure that pagerank is really the best algorithm for a discussion forum. Not that I know a better alternative. Searching these forums is also inevitably hard because we ramble off topic so much!

I've found that you can get better results by using some of Google's extra features. For example, searching for

kaboom

gives you threads mentioning kabooms whereas

kaboom intitle:xd

would give you threads that mentioned kabooms and had xd in the thread title. I find the "intitle" command quite useful for narrowing down my searches, because often the thread title is what I want to search.

Another good one is the synonym search ~. For example

glock guide

looks for glock and guide, but

glock ~guide

will also prioritize synonyms of guide, like "tips".

[Carnes]

I have a suggestion for helping this forums search engines work better:

In the rules, or somewhere, make a statement that says something to the effect of,

"Please ensure that your post title and body include terms related to the thread in a meaningful way. While this is not an enforced requirement, it will help ensure that our search function is much more useful. Threads with titles such as "wtf?" may include information about a particular subject, but the title will make it unlikely for users to find that information by using the search function. The same applies to information in the body of the post."

I bring this up because I just saw the youtube video showing the ND of a LEO while addressing a class of kids, for the third or fourth time. Maybe my search-fu is weak today, but I could not find any of the other threads where that video was posted. Then I looked at the thread in question and noticed the title was, "wtf?" and the entire post consisted of, "Ironic? u tell me," then a link to the video. That's when it occured to me that title selection and a few words in the body is actually pretty important for the search function... Maybe a few words of encouragement in the forum rules might be enough to get the word out on this?

[lildobe]

I've found that you can get better results by using some of Google's extra features. For example, searching for

Is there a tutorial on these extra features? I only know a few of them, and I never knew about the Synonym search!

[Philbert]

Is there a tutorial on these extra features? I only know a few of them, and I never knew about the Synonym search!

The Google guide is nice. There was an O'Reilly book "Google Hacks" but it's a bit dated now.