Improving the ASR search function - is it possible?

[Xulonn]

Maybe some day - I hope - ASR will have a sophisticated search subroutine, because the current one is horribly limited. We have a wealth of information that often requires endless browsing to find simple answers. There are many techies here who can use Google's site search, but that is not helpful to the general public and non-techies who come here looking for highly usable, narrowly defined discussions, test results and recommendations.

Perhaps someone looking for a high page view count might see a benefit in forcing non-techie visitors through a maze of semi-relevant search hits, but there are better ways to accomplish that. Making the search function as stellar as ASR's growing treasure trove of test and measurement results could transorm an already excellent audio forum website to an incredible one.

I assume that our current membership includes some techies with software and web design background. Are there any coders out there who can volunteer a little time to help out with this issue? Or simply clarify the issues involved.

(Years ago - in the days of DOS 3.1, 5.0, and the early days of Windows 3.1, I worked in sales and tech support for a California scientific software company. I also participated in alpha testing and helped with tech support for beta testers. I am not a programmer, but I have seen what really good coders can do.)

 

[Hugo9000]

I actually use Google's site search mostly out of necessity because of years of frustration with search functions on various (all of them I've been on, maybe? lol) forums, so I'm used to it. I do use ASR's search for certain things, though, so it would be nice if it could be improved.

 

[Chrispy]

Is there forum software where the search DOES work well?

 

[Dimitri]

You are lloking for a "search" to return to you the results "you want".
Searches return results based on what you looked for, not what you wanted

 

[Dimitri]

Ok, I'll bite; What is it you are looking for that you can't find ?

 

[Chrispy]

You are lloking for a "search" to return to you the results "you want".
Searches return results based on what you looked for, not what you wanted

In my experience the forum internal searches return more what I think of as bizarre results...

 

[Sal1950]

For searching the internal database of ASR I find the XenForo engines function fully capable.

 

[Deleted member 9286]

I find it functions quite well, my only gripe is since moving to an iPhone 11 Pro, it seems to be very difficult to select the search input field and type my values. It has become very clunky.

 

[amirm]

Our search function is hugely superior to what you see on other forums. It uses Elasticsearch which allows for phonetic searches including short phrases. On standard forums for example, you can't search for NFS, DVD, etc. On ours you can.

That said, it is made for generic forum searches and doesn't work well to for example find reviews and go to the first post there.

As a hint, if you are looking for a review, be sure to put my alias in there as the poster and put the word "review" after the text. Then when search results come up, click on one and then go to page 1.

I say 80% of the time I find what I need using forums search. The other 20% of the time I use Google. Without advanced search we have, I would use Google all the time.

The various indices we have are designed around the limitations of search.

So yes, a better search would be nice but it just isn't in the scope right now.

 

[MZKM]

Our search function is hugely superior to what you see on other forums. It uses Elasticsearch which allows for phonetic searches including short phrases. On standard forums for example, you can't search for NFS, DVD, etc. On ours you can.

That said, it is made for generic forum searches and doesn't work well to for example find reviews and go to the first post there.

As a hint, if you are looking for a review, be sure to put my alias in there as the poster and put the word "review" after the text. Then when search results come up, click on one and then go to page 1.

I say 80% of the time I find what I need using forums search. The other 20% of the time I use Google. Without advanced search we have, I would use Google all the time.

The various indices we have are designed around the limitations of search.

So yes, a better search would be nice but it just isn't in the scope right now.

Much better than Reddit’s, I just use Google instead to find the Reddit thread/comment I want. Sometimes I’ll have part of the title correct and Reddit‘s search will show no results. I’ll take more results than I wish rather than no results.

 

[Totoro]

Maybe some day - I hope - ASR will have a sophisticated search subroutine, because the current one is horribly limited. We have a wealth of information that often requires endless browsing to find simple answers. There are many techies here who can use Google's site search, but that is not helpful to the general public and non-techies who come here looking for highly usable, narrowly defined discussions, test results and recommendations.

Perhaps someone looking for a high page view count might see a benefit in forcing non-techie visitors through a maze of semi-relevant search hits, but there are better ways to accomplish that. Making the search function as stellar as ASR's growing treasure trove of test and measurement results could transorm an already excellent audio forum website to an incredible one.

I assume that our current membership includes some techies with software and web design background. Are there any coders out there who can volunteer a little time to help out with this issue? Or simply clarify the issues involved.

(Years ago - in the days of DOS 3.1, 5.0, and the early days of Windows 3.1, I worked in sales and tech support for a California scientific software company. I also participated in alpha testing and helped with tech support for beta testers. I am not a programmer, but I have seen what really good coders can do.)

Our search function is hugely superior to what you see on other forums. It uses Elasticsearch which allows for phonetic searches including short phrases. On standard forums for example, you can't search for NFS, DVD, etc. On ours you can.

That said, it is made for generic forum searches and doesn't work well to for example find reviews and go to the first post there.

As a hint, if you are looking for a review, be sure to put my alias in there as the poster and put the word "review" after the text. Then when search results come up, click on one and then go to page 1.

I say 80% of the time I find what I need using forums search. The other 20% of the time I use Google. Without advanced search we have, I would use Google all the time.

The various indices we have are designed around the limitations of search.

So yes, a better search would be nice but it just isn't in the scope right now.

i have spent years doing lucene/solr and then elasticsearch. Haven’t done it for a living in a couple years, but if you ever want someone to do something with your elasticsearch, pm me, I’ll do it for free if I can.

 

[amirm]

i have spent years doing lucene/solr and then elasticsearch. Haven’t done it for a living in a couple years, but if you ever want someone to do something with your elasticsearch, pm me, I’ll do it for free if I can.

Super. Good to know. Thanks!

 

[Totoro]

A couple things to think about are: would it be useful to do named entity recognition on ingestion of docs to recognize brands,electronic types, etc. We would have to set something up for tagging using prodigy or similar and get volunteers to tag. I’ve done NER ingestion plug-ins for elastic search before, and have the code lying around somewhere.

Another would be looking at auto suggesters. There are some built in ones that are ok. Ive done very elaborate ones before, but it’s kind of a lot of work for one person on weekends.

 

[somebodyelse]

You are lloking for a "search" to return to you the results "you want".
Searches return results based on what you looked for, not what you wanted

Searching for I2S when what you wanted was I²S would be one frustrating example. OTOH Google seem to be getting worse at including the thing you did actually search for, even when you put it in quotes. Once upon a time you could use '+' for that...

 

[amirm]

A couple things to think about are: would it be useful to do named entity recognition on ingestion of docs to recognize brands,electronic types, etc. We would have to set something up for tagging using prodigy or similar and get volunteers to tag. I’ve done NER ingestion plug-ins for elastic search before, and have the code lying around somewhere.

Another would be looking at auto suggesters. There are some built in ones that are ok. Ive done very elaborate ones before, but it’s kind of a lot of work for one person on weekends.

The problem is that whatever is done, then requires work on integration with the platform software. The UI is part of the latter.

 

[Martin]

ASR’s search has always worked well for me. As someone else mentioned it’s a bit of a pain using Safari on my iPhone. Still, I find what I’m looking for. It’s a heck of a lot better than most other forum searches. The one on AVSforum is absolutely useless.

Martin

 

[Totoro]

The problem is that whatever is done, then requires work on integration with the platform software. The UI is part of the latter.

True enough. The auto suggester would be relatively easy to integrate, I would think. The NER thing would change the schema, so that might be more of a pain. I‘lol go poke around at xenforo and see how painful modifying the search is.

in the past I always had someone doing the front end, so I never had to deal with the javascript for doing the auto suggestion.

 

[Doodski]

I find the search function to usually return a result on the first search. Sometimes I modify the search parameters but not too often.

 

[Dimitri]

Searching for I2S when what you wanted was I²S would be one frustrating example. OTOH Google seem to be getting worse at including the thing you did actually search for, even when you put it in quotes. Once upon a time you could use '+' for that...

I2S or I²S by itself will return too much. I was trying to get an idea of what it is someone might be looking for here that they have a hard time finding.

In general I sually find what I'm looking for. Seldom it's a one-liner answer to my query.
I don't search here. I read a lot.

"Give me a better search so I can find what I'm looking for" is as bad as
searching for "shoulder pain remedies" hoping / expecting the "search result" will be something like "Skip baseball practice for 2 weeks "

There are more bad searches than there are bad searches.

 

[Blumlein 88]

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to search a given thread. With these threads growing so fast they get unwieldy in a hurry. Also over at Gearslutz once you open a thread as well as being able to search in the opened thread, you can click on someone's username, and an option is to show only that person's post in that thread. That can be very handy for instance to keep up with what questions Amir has answered in a given thread or to follow a discussion to separate a given posters posts so they make more sense.

That said, the search on ASR is usually pretty good, and only rarely do I resort to google searching this site.