[tjc] the frequent duplicates situation
asked 2014-08-23 16:07:20 +0300
Hi guys,
Alot of questions on tjc, are in fact duplicates, I myself even being careful searching first, sometimes have to close one question or another for being duplicate.
I think the biggest culprit is the fact that the search box is not very smart!
The reason I say this is because I always look for my question's keywords before I ask a new question, but the search box rarely connects the dots.
The main problems are:
- The search box won't find partial word matches
- It won't find related keywords either
I feel this is a bit troublesome, and we could do alot better. Having a better search algorithm could greatly increase the quality and focus of tjc! Are there no plans to improve this situation?
EDIT: Tried Tag searching, as suggested by @simo, and got partial keyword matching, but still no related keywords, and worst of all, it's out of focus, since most people will use the ask box, and won't even notice the tag search box.
At least half of the functionality is a low hanging fruit, so when are we going to improve the ask box?
EDIT 2: Just found a hilarious case, after seeing on the related column of some post, another one about mplayer/mpv playing which interested me, I closed that tab. But afterwards I went to look for that post with the search box and neither mplayer, nor mpv, had any matches, not even mplayer/mpv, the only way to find a match was to write mplayer/mpv-based!
Isn't this incredibly unhelpful? Is Jolla not going to move a muscle about fixing this incredibly inneficient tool, plaguing tjc?
The dropdown lists only those results that have the words you typed in their titles. As Tanghus said, when you press Enter, you get to see all results, including those where the words you typed are only found in the body of the posts.
nthn ( 2014-08-23 19:42:15 +0300 )edithad the same issue with some network related thing. i was searching fir it and asked later and it was duplicate of some question related to nails. it was not possoble to find this
NuklearFart ( 2014-11-05 09:38:55 +0300 )edit@dsilveira: Feel free to report a feature request in the upstream askbot project in order to get a smarter seach. I personally do not face the issues you have with the search. The suggested results in the dropdown are suggestions and unless you press enter or click on the magnifier glass icon, you will not get the total amount of results matching your query. When it comes to searching for tags, or users, the functionality is only accessible if you click on the related links on the top right of the page. There are no keywords in askbot but tags, and searching for these do actually return correct matches AFAICS...
eric ( 2014-11-13 16:32:06 +0300 )editRegarding edit 2, searching for "mplayer" (pressing enter to show the results) finds that question.
ssahla ( 2014-12-02 07:53:18 +0300 )editIndeed, the dropdown only works for full words separated by space. But typing "mplayer" and hitting enter gives you... 3 results. Pretty easy to sort out no? No need to up the topic every two weeks, I know it's not perfect, but when you want find something, you can. Just try both ways...
Sthocs ( 2014-12-02 13:00:39 +0300 )edit