WTF Is going on with the search bars?

S

squidrider

Member
so Usually when i look up something it will search by date. say last week I looked up smith i o's and the search came up with posts about smith i o's from newest date to the oldest date. but now it has been giving me incredibly random posts from like 2 years ago and i cant find any new posts anywhere. is this a glitch in the site or something? help guys!
 
I was just going to make a thread about this. I actually like it. It seems to be sorted by relevance rather than date. However, I wish that you could choose by relevance/date created/amount of replies. That would be the searchbar perfected.
 
i want to find the most recent sale in b/s/t for a pair of new 28.5 SPKs, and i can't. i don't want to painstakingly scroll and squint at every date on every page, i want that shit organized for me, dammit
have clickable tabs or something (like itunes or *gasp* the video section!) or a drop down menu that asks which organization you would prefer (date, relevance, # of views, etc.)
 
Because when you're searching its difficult to give you the result you want.

To break this down a bit, remember that what you want is very different from what you type. Sure what you type has something to do with what you want but...

'sweet lines' could mean:

-review of rad line skis

-review of a mountain

-forum thread about line

-forum thread about lines on a mountain

and so on.

Text matching does almost nothing for giving you 'what you want'. Now, we have a super terrible way of assisting with this by allowing filtering by section. At least you can pair it down by what type of content on NS you're looking for.

Google has bananas amounts of data that they collect, which is unfathomable to you and me. They literally download the entire internet constantly every day, and process the fuck out of it in real-time over a network of worldwide data centers with more computing power than you can imagine and run those searches through the most complicated algorithm ever invented.

They take all manners of data points to give you 'what you want'.

Easy to say 'so use google' - and we have done that in the past. However, people didn't like it because there weren't the filters. Our old search sucked, our new search sucks, our google search sucked... everything about search on Newschoolers fucking sucks fucking rocks.

I would absolutely love to address this issue, and believe me its on our radar - however to do it RIGHT - and make it 'not suck' - we have to really look at the information architecture of Newschoolers, and tailor what we're doing to what people are searching for. Simple quick changes to the search aren't going to do much, as we've been there a zillion times. Every simple change we makes ends up absolutely sucking.

So for right now, we're working on the million other things that people want to see changed on Newschoolers, and we're letting the search rot. Does it suck? Yes. Does it suck worse than other things we've done? Depends on what you're searching for.

This is a huge issue with the site, and something that we'll dial in one of these days... but for the time being it is something that we're leaving as is. The best thing we may do is put google search back in, but allow you to pass more operators into it for section searching. In terms of ab and-aid, that is probably it.

 
I always found that the best way to search on NS was to go to google and type this...

"Site:Newschoolers.com (your search)"
 
Can't pleas everyone but to put my 2 cents in ...

Most of the time I use the search bar to go find gear for sale in the B/S/T forums. This new set up makes that nearly impossible. I don't want to see a sale that was going on in November of 2009.

Don't know if it is reasonable or even possible, but could there be a search unique to B/S/T that worked the same as before?

 
BOOM! I was going to make a thread on the exact same problem.

we need to be able to have some filters on our search results. could we search just b/s/t by date?
 
so you can't just have two searchbars? one like the old one and one like the new one? I don't literally mean two bars, but like a checkbox or something that gets you the results that the old one would have gotten?
 
can we maybe have a way to sort results by date or something? I find the new search unusable. I either search for recent opinions on skis or B/S/T threads and it just doesn't really work now.
 
I'm just going to bump this because the search is for the most part unusable at this point in time. The results returned are next to useless.

Don't know if anyone has been giving positive feedback with regards to the new search but it just isn't doing it for me.
 
Yea it's probably easier said than done, but what about in addition to the drop down box offering where you want to search...another drop down box that also offers how you want to search. Whether that be by date, or by most relevant, or by thread title. I think that would be the best of all worlds.
 
Yep, just adding to the disgust of the search bar. How difficult is it to add a "filter results by" option along with the search? If I want to search for a specific ski in the BST forum, I don't give two shits about a "where should I mount this ski" thread from 2005.
 
they already have the choice of filters when you search in the video or news sections, don't know why they haven't adapted the same coding to the general searchbar though
 
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